Actor

You hope that some day a part will come along and you can do your stuff and people will go, 'oh that's good.' I just got very lucky.

I'd love to do something funny. Our work often deals with tough subjects. You do your research and it can be quite dark. So after all these years of drama, I'd like to go to work someday with the sole intention of making people laugh.

I would hope that the Government would still support those small, struggling independent theatre companies and also maybe look to the built architecture of the theaters because we can't let them get into disrepair. They are part of the fabric of the country.

I was really proud of the response to the first series of 'Blood.' Right from the get-go I knew it was a really good yarn and that it would have a chance if we got it right.

Beckett was the most thorough of playwrights. He tells you what to do and if you've any humility at all, you'll take his advice.

When you're young and a teenager, there's an air of excitement about living with a time when you have to grasp life as much as you can because it may be taken from you.

I am on a mural in Belfast with 'Floating up the Lagan in a bubble' on it. You know you have made it when you have got a mural.

There's no doubt that New York held its temptations for any writer - it still does.

Any mother watching her son achieve his dreams shares that success at some level.

When I was at drama school some of the teachers, who were very wise, said to me, 'You're going to be a great actor in your 50s. Now, you're not malleable enough. You're doing one thing well but you need to loosen up a bit.' That happens to actors. You learn more about it and hopefully you get better at it as you get older.

There were two drama societies in Enniskillen when I was growing up, St. Michaels and the Enniskillen Amateur Dramatic Society, and I had the pleasure of working with them both.

'The Decay Of Lying' is a very interesting treatise. It was actually penned as a dialogue between two characters, Cyril and Vyvyan, both of who were named after Wilde's sons. Wilde goes on to extrapolate art as a science and as a social pleasure, to its most logical and illogical extremes, and it ends up being very funny, indeed.

I love going back to Northern Ireland.

In Shakespeare, the moral balances are very fine.

We're in a golden age for television. TV 25 years ago was slow, plodding , boring. The production values were not great. Today it's so much better. People get really invested it.

Comedy is essentially about watching a bunch of people who you really love lose their dignity.

I'd actually love to do comedy. It would be great to go to work to get a laugh.

I've been lucky enough to do a tiny bit of Shakespeare onstage over the years.

I am absolutely an Ulsterman and I am reminded of that everywhere I go. I can't shake that in Dublin and I can't shake that in London - they are wary of us in both capitals.

I'm over the moon to play an iconic character like Ted Hastings and for my career to be defined by this role - that's a place very few actors get to.