I would like to be as fit as I've always been. I've been blessed with good health, I've been blessed with stamina. Particularly for those great classical roles, you need an Olympian stamina. I, fortunately, have that.
I truly don't know why it was ended, though. It was suddenly decided that that would be it. They never said particularly why, because they were cut off in their prime.
I thought it was getting better and better, because the production values were increasing each time we did it.
I think that each character has fascinated and interested me enough to want to play him.
I think my parents were happy that I'd gone to university and gotten a degree in history so they thought, 'Well if acting doesn't work for him, he can always become a history teacher or something.' Fortunately, the acting worked out.
I think actors always retain one foot in the cradle. We're switched on to our youth, to our childhood. We have to be because we're in the business of transferring emotions to other people.
I shall miss all the people in it and the great fun we had doing it. I enjoyed playing the character very much. It was a very, very special character and a very special series. And the camaraderie of it all. I loved it.
I never lose that terror of 'this is my last job, I'll never work again.' You can never relax and rely on whatever reputation you've built.
I had to think long and hard about what it would imply, what it would mean. Would it mean any alterations of one's lifestyle? Or, more than that, the way that people regarded you? The way they reacted to you if you had a Sir in front of your name?
I am an actor and I live in the world of pretend in my working capacity. I live in the world of my imagination.
He was somebody who made me think, I suppose, about the contemplative life. I've always been a city fellow, but I've often had vague thoughts about 'checking out' and perhaps going into a monastery and just seeing what it was like.
He was living in an age much more dangerous, more painful, much more on the edge than our own particular age.
Every person who is offered a knighthood has the opportunity to say yes or no. You get a letter from the Prime Minister saying you've been recommended for a knighthood and there are two little boxes, one says yes, one says no.
Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute, and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination.
Actors, I don't think, ever really grow up. I'm hoping that that rejuvenating process applies to me, too. It has so far. I've been very lucky.
Real-life people are often the hardest to play, people that you recreate who have actually lived, because you have to live up to people's knowledge of those characters.
I don't think he's permanently affected me except in the sense that I miss him. I miss being him. Or trying to be him. He is one of a gallery of characters that have had an impact on my career and therefore my life.
There's never been any game plan or thread through my career. It's just happened that I've ricocheted from one interesting character to another.
I tend to play characters that I can infuse with certain kinds of humour. Even the baddest guy can be funny in his own particular way. I want the audience to engage with the character on some deeper level so that they leave the cinema still thinking about him.
I look at myself as an audience member. I still love movies, and I still go and sit in the back of the big dark room with everybody else, and I want the same thrill.
I kind of realize that I have a tendency to choose the kind of films I watched when I was a kid and would go home and pretend with my friends that we were in those movies after we saw them.
I grew up watching those blaxploitation movies. Ron O'Neal, Richard Roundtree, Jim Brown, Pam Grier. For the first time, I saw 'The Negro' get one over on 'The Man.'
I did 'Formula 51' because I got to run around Liverpool in a kilt, with golf clubs.
Because of where I come from, I never thought I'd see in my life a black candidate running for President.
All movies aren't fun; some are hard work. You try to do something and convey a set of emotions that have to do with some real life kind of stuff.
We need to change America's image round the world. America has lost some lustre in terms of how folks aspire to be like us.
Not everybody goes to movies to get their life changed.
I understood, through rehab, things about creating characters. I understood that creating whole people means knowing where we come from, how we can make a mistake and how we overcome things to make ourselves stronger.
I love comic books and I love anime.
I just always knew that I lived in two worlds. There was the world of my house and community, but to make my way in that white world I had to modify the way I spoke and acted. I had to sometimes not make direct eye contact.
