Actor

I'm not a big fan of patterns. I like the unexpected.

I'm a serial monogamist.

I wanted somebody who had a heart and a soul, because Joe Carroll is soulless. There was nothing in there. He was a vacuum of a man.

I'm on record saying that HBO is the best television company in the world, and I believe they are. I think they absolutely understand how to make television that is really, really vital and interesting and visceral, and all the things that television really should be.

When you don't take what you have for granted, you constantly try to re-prove yourself to yourself rather than to other people.

When you're unhappy, you tend to play up, don't you?

Hospitals are very extreme places - you can be in a maternity room one minute, and by someone's bedside as they're dying the next.

A voice and an accent are two very different things. The voice of a man is how he speaks from his heart, right in the middle of him... And then you stick an accent on top of that.

There are only a few TV networks that really invest in production in the way that I think they should. HBO, obviously, is one of them.

British actors are pretty good, by and large, at turning on at 'action' and off at 'cut.'

My pub was full of get-rich-quick schemes that never worked - scams, pyramid schemes. People trying to find a way to get themselves out of a rut.

I do live a weirdly divided life, because I'm not a Hollywood superstar, I don't live on Malibu Beach, I don't do massive 'OK!' spreads, I don't go to premieres and parties that much.

The East Texas accent is a famously difficult accent to do.

I was very unmotivated at school.

Playing Mark Antony in 'Rome' will always be a favourite of mine because he was such an outrageously big and interesting character to play. Also, the fact that we were able, with that character, to find out and present the public with a biography of that man that had not been really seen before.

Dieting isn't complicated: if you eat 2,000 calories, you have to burn it off; simple as that.