Actor

One longs for a director with a sense of imagination.

I think worrying things are going on in England - a real apathy.

I have a photograph at home of Fred Astaire from the knees down with his feet crossed. It's kind of inspiring because it reminds me his feet were bleeding at the end of rehearsals. Yet when you watch him, all you see is freedom. It's a reminder of what the job is about in general, not just being in musicals.

Three children have become adults since a phone call with Jo Rowling, containing one small clue, persuaded me that there was more to Snape than an unchanging costume, and that even though only three of the books were out at that time, she held the entire massive but delicate narrative in the surest of hands.

England in the '60s and the '70s was everything that history has said; it was phenomenally exciting, musically.

The first time that I came to New York to work properly was the mid-'80s, but I was doing eight shows a week. You have no life. Going to a punk rock club - or whatever the music was at that time - would not have been on my agenda.

It's a nightmare to sit and watch a film that I'm in. There's a horrible inescapability to it.

My idea of a real treat is Magic Mountain without standing in line.

If you spend any time in Los Angeles, there's only one topic of conversation.

You know, London is so sprawling, and you can sometimes forget that anybody else is on a stage anywhere else.

Mellow doesn't describe me. I'm hungry every day.

Being on the stage in New York is always exciting because you feel like you're part of the life of the city.

I was 7, and I remember being given a part in a play and thinking, This is exciting.

I love working in New York theater.

It would be wonderful to think that the future is unknown and sort of surprising.

I like it when stories are left open.

I love perfumes. Every morning when my girlfriend and I come down to the courtyard in our block of flats we're assailed by the most delicious scent - jasmine round a doorway. It almost makes me swoon.

I'm a lot less serious than people think.

When I get off the plane in England I always feel about two inches shorter.

I do take my work seriously and the way to do that is not to take yourself too seriously.