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" I'm not a great fiction reader. I love history. I love history and philosophy. "

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" Mike Leigh taught me about making choices - as an actor, you choose between being honest and clever, and with Mike, it's always about being honest. I learned how to behave on a film set from Jim Broadbent. He was a great example of someone with a fantastic career who kept his feet on the ground. "

" I had a good job as a printer in the East End. Before the unions destroyed it, that job was very lucrative. "

" I didn't do well at school, and I don't have lots of academic reference points. "

" You turn up on set, and somebody who has come out of Oxford, has done a BBC course, is telling you how to act. You think, 'Do me a favour. Go and make a coffee.' "

" I'm like a mechanic. If you break down and phone the AA, they'll come to you whether it's raining or snowing. That's what an actor should do. "

" As a working-class actor, leaving school with no qualifications, being a printer and then becoming an actor and then working with people who to a certain extent had had a leg up. I never had that advantage. It's less an artistic need to express myself and more a need to prove myself. "

" I come from a council estate in Tower Hamlets, and by no means am I the only person who has done well - one of my friends is head of year in a great school in Twickenham. Another is a writer; another is an artist, a musician. "

" I used to do a lot of comedy. I don't know what happened. I think it's my face. "

" I listen to a lot of jazz. I'm a big Sinatra geek. I love Chet Baker. "

" Mr. Norrell is like a librarian trying to do magic... That's the story of my career, really. I stand next to good looking men and make them look better! "

" When I first started doing press, one of the things people started pushing was this idea that I'd somehow escaped something. And I was really offended, because I hadn't escaped anything. "

" I was brought up in a house full of women; the first time I realised no one was interrupting me was when I was on stage - that's probably the subconscious reason I became an actor. "

" I'm very blue collar myself. So it was easy for me to embody that in a sense. It's much harder for me to embody Norrell than it is to embody Terry Donovan. "

" I always define egotistical thoughts as the thoughts I think other people have of me. "

" 'Ray Donovan' is very dark and very serious. As actors will tell you, the darker and more serious the material, the more jokes that go around set. It's a counterbalance. "

" When I think of character actors, I think of Spencer Tracy; I think of Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall. When I was a young lad watching films, my eyes were on them - watching 'On the Waterfront,' my eyes are on Rod Steiger and Karl Malden, not on Brando. "

" I've never played a gay character on screen, so that would be interesting. I've never played a gay character, and that would fascinate me because I'm not gay, so that would interest me. "

" I always think of Gilbert Norrell as being Salieri to Jonathan Strange being Mozart. "

" I see all these people talking about acting as a great spiritual thing. It's not. There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do, but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination. "

" In my family, there was no celebration of ignorance. They'd come and see Chekhov or Shakespeare. I've got a sister who got a first in her degree. We don't sit around watching TV all the time. "

" I love Bethnal Green and where I'm from. Nothing there, especially the people, ever held me back, but I never felt that I was successful there. "

" I'm a great believer that actors are very similar to session musicians. You wouldn't ask a session musician, 'How do you play jazz,' and then, 'How do you play classical?' They just do it, because if they don't do it, they don't eat. "

" I could not be one of those actors who stays in character all day long. I'd go mad. "

" If your character doesn't express himself or doesn't feel confident expressing himself, then you don't express yourself. "

" When you watch 'Ray Donovan,' you think that it's about Hollywood, about scandal, about stars, and about trying to keep secrets. That's true, but that's also just the means by which you reveal secrets of the people suffering every day life. "

" I'd love to play a Bond villain. Yeah, I'd love to play a Bond villain. Everyone always says this to me; they always say, 'You've got to be a Bond villain', 'We're going to make you a Bond villain...' But they've never, ever approached me, I've never had a whiff of it. I think I'd love to play a Bond villain; I'd have great fun. "

" If you're confident, then it helps you live up to your potential, but if you believe because you went to a certain school it means you're entitled to have a particular career, you'll fall flat on your face eventually. "

" I get a lot of people saying to me, 'Oh, you're the actor who plays the nutters,' and I'm not. I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants. "

" You can't write a screenplay if you've been doing a zero-hours contract. Which means that the people who write drama, the people who commission dramas, and the people who direct dramas all come from a small circle of society. "

" What I love about the East End is that there's a great perseverance, determination and courage. What I dislike about it is that there is sometimes a celebration of ignorance. "