To tell you the truth, the older I get, the less I know. I keep meeting people, both older and younger, who seem to have accrued so much more knowledge or expertise or certainty about who they are and the jobs they do. I just marvel at it.
I couldn’t imagine what Fox thought they were doing, contemplating such a jagged protagonist for a prime-time drama. I only knew that I wanted the role very much.
Clive Dunn, as I understand it, retired to the south of Spain, where he worked extensively in watercolours. I don’t own any of Clive Dunn’s watercolours. I loved him in ‘Dad’s Army,’ loved him. But not enough to actually seek out his watercolour work.
Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it’s all punctuation.
Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. When I ride through Beverly Hills in the early morning, and all the sprinklers have turned off, the scents that wash over me are just heavenly. Being House is like flying, too. You’re free of the gravity of what people think.
To be a head boy, you have to be very clever, you have to be a scholar, and I was never a scholar in any shape or form.
Humility was a cult in my family. I only got it out of my father by accident when he was very old that he had won an Olympic gold medal.
People assume that I’m very highly trained, that I studied and did years and years of Shakespeare. I have no training whatsoever and I’ve only done one Shakespeare play at university. If people want to believe that, I’m happy to go along with it.
I didn’t realize House would be the central character, more the bitter comic relief appearing occasionally. I relish his wounded nature – the lameness, the scarred Byronic hero.
I would cling to unhappiness because it was a known, familiar state. When I was happier, it was because I knew I was on my way back to misery. I’ve never been convinced that happiness is the object of the game. I’m wary of happiness.
You hope that your teenage self would like and forgive your 50-year-old self.
Happiness is the twinkle in your grandmother’s eye as you reverse the tractor off her legs.
One great benefit of not being on TV every week is that people will be a lot less interested in what I have in my supermarket basket. I could even un-tint my car windows – or at least opt for a lighter shade.
It is the middle of December now, and we are about to travel to Switzerland – where we plan to ski a little, relax a little, and shoot a Dutch politician a little.
I think maybe even one of the reasons I became an actor was actually to hide. I mean, it sounds paradoxical because, of course, people are standing up in a public place and encouraging other people to look at them. So that’s not the conventional definition of hiding.
I travel to work on my motorcycle, so it’s jeans, boots and a brown Aero leather jacket that weighs as much as I do. If it were black, it would seem like I’ve got a Brando idea going on, which I don’t.
It gets on top of me and I get frustrated.
I rowed for Cambridge. I was pretty good at that.
Believe it or not, perhaps I don’t show it much, or well, but I think I like people.
Perseverance does not equal worthiness. Next time you want to get my attention, wear something fun. Low-riding jeans are hot.