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" I've got four kids to feed and a wife to provide for. It's a worry but a great responsibility as well and one I relish. "

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" I consciously decided not to be a 'London' actor. Those gangster movies made a lot of East End actors think they were movie stars. And I was very aware that they were going to go out of fashion. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Paddy Considine is a great friend of mine, and he is a natural actor because he is an artist, and I'm not an artist. If I ever blow my own trumpet, it's as a craftsman. "

" Different races never fazed me because coming from Bethnal Green, I'd been around people of different races forever. Different class? That was much harder. "

" The hardest thing to do and most miserable films are comedies. "

The Hardest Thing

" 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'm used to playing characters who have a lot to say but don't know how to say it. "

" I have friends who are leading men, and they're only ever allowed to play leading men of a certain type. But as a character actor, there's a wider variety of projects available. On the big Hollywood films, all they care about is having their lead in place, so it's actually easier for someone like me to slip in. And I'm happy to do so. "

" I was approached to do something for seven years, and it was a quality project. I did seriously think about it, but I didn't want to be away for six months of the year. I've never done the L.A. thing where you go and have loads of meetings; I can't say to my wife, 'I'm going to wait by a pool for six months.' "

" 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. "

" I want to be respected as an actor. There's my ego. But I don't have a great need to be liked by an audience. "

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

" When I was a struggling actor, I worked for a party company. One of my friends from school was working for an advertising agency, and I turned up to one of his company's parties dressed as an alien to collect tickets on the door. "

" It's a very fascinating thing for an actor to play somebody who is suffering, and you have to express the suffering, but in an inarticulate way and sometimes a dysfunctional way, through violence. "

" I wouldn't have been interested in making a show just about Hollywood, 'cause I find Hollywood boring. I find people and families very interesting. "

" My friends I grew up with were so supportive to me. And I'm not the only one who's done well. "

" I knew very early on that I wasn't Brad Pitt. "

" 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. "

" 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'm not one of these actors who can make a bad script good. Some actors, a script can be terrible, and they can bring something to it and make it really special. I can't. "

" 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. "

" Major film stars tend to do a film and then have a couple of months off. I'm not a major film star; I'm a jobbing actor. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Art is the job of the privileged. "

" Magic symbolises the subconscious - that part of us that is creative and powerful that we sometimes don't tap into. "

" 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 wasn't one of the ones voted most likely to succeed when I was at drama school, but I persevered and concentrated on the acting rather than going to the right parties and getting the right agent. Eventually, after ten years, it paid off. "