My father was a CPA. He worked hard in the aircraft industry, and would come home more and more infrequently. He was about to leave my mother, which he did when I was 15.

I liked the theater. I liked the people. I liked the time that we worked.

However, I wasn’t very good at the sciences, or didn’t have a lot of help in the sciences or something but certainly didn’t set science for my A level. And when I came to take my A levels I didn’t get a good enough result to go to University.

I had done a fair bit of traveling during the holidays in my school days with my guitar and discovered that I could live on it. Admittedly, I traveled with a sleeping bag but I could always find somewhere to lay my head.

Paris Hilton, that’s very interesting what she did. I’ve never done that. I haven’t really sort of ever got into that. As time passes, maybe I should record it and put it in a vault so that when I get a little old don’t have the energy I can remember how life used to be.

My next step must be to go to drama school. Well, I get into drama school, so I did that.

Americans enjoy uniformity in a way that the British don’t; they wanted everybody of a sort of nice chorus line height and here I was, this person who was a good three inches taller than anyone else on the end of the line.

My father was a CPA. He worked hard in the aircraft industry, and would come home more and more infrequently. He was about to leave my mother, which he did when I was 15.

I was the youngest. The yule lamb. The one who always got away without doing the washing up. My sister was four years older, and my brother six years.

At age 10 or 12 he’s going to boarding school in the Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight is, of course, down at the bottom of England just off South Hampton.

Because I’m now successful, what I’m being offered as an actor is more and more of the same.

An acting assistant stage manager in a theater in Canterbury, a rep theater. A small wage but just enough to get by on, and I made props and I walked on, and I changed scenery, and I realized that I just loved it.

So nevertheless, what I’m saying is that what one is – one’s parameters are constantly narrowed by one’s success, and my desire is to widen my field even if I risk failure.

No, I don’t believe in hard work. If something is hard, leave it. Let it come to you. Let it happen.

And whenever I’m in a situation where I’m wearing the same as 600 other people and doing the same thing as 600 other people, looking back, I always found ways to make myself different, whether it be having a red lining inside of my jacket, having red shoes, it hasn’t changed.

A trip to the mainland was a big event and happened maybe once a year, although now you can get across in a speed boat in seven minutes but then it was a long way away.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.

I was not naturally intellectual, but somebody whose interest had to be whetted, still the case sadly.

It’s always great to play a man who sets himself up to be punctured.

So the better my partner or my opposition, however you like to think about it, the better my game.

So I continued through my next school, which takes me up to the age of 17, moving from the bottom stream of one year into the bottom stream of the next year, all the way through. I showed other talents which gave me self-respect, which is fine.

Actors often behave like children, and so we’re taken for children. I want to be grown up.

I succeeded on sort of chutzpah and charm. No technique at all, didn’t know what I was doing, but it worked and the character suited me.

I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.

Now in my theater training I showed no aptitude at all.

Godspell was a good leap for me, it was a good shop window.

What I try to do as an actor is constantly find that, find ways to risk, find opportunities to fall on my face if it’s going to be worth it, and then maybe I’ll surprise myself.

And trust, yes, which is important, but that is what I aim towards. Now that is difficult for some people, and with that desire to get things as good as possible, I would say that I’m probably regarded as quite prickly to work with.

I envy children who know that they’re going to become doctors, know they’re going to go into the forces or whatever. I think choice is one of the hardest things, but that’s what I try to give my children, to say you can do anything.

I think I would not be described as a character actor in that I don’t take on characteristics which are very alien to me.

The sad thing about any business I suppose, but in mine you see it particularly, is that you’re always asked to do what you’ve already done.