It used to be that I was always paranoid or a loser or something so there's usually something that you seem to associate yourself with at one time or another.
My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood, so I've sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people, so there's no virtue in that; it's the way one is raised.
The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.
People have the idea of missionaries as going out with the Bible and hitting natives with it. It's not really what they were doing. They were all doing something rather different.
In this case it appealed to me partly because it felt close to me in some ways. This is about a confused, bewildered middle class Englishman adrift in smalltown America and that has definitely been me.
I work with the options I have in front of me and my reasons for choosing a job can vary enormously depending on the circumstances. Sometimes I take a job because it's a group of people I'm dying to work with, and sometimes it can be a desire to shake things up a bit and not to take myself too seriously.
My looks aren't something that come dazzlingly through in everything I do. I can be made to look one way or the other fairly easily... I am still not recognised on the street that much.
My primary instinct as an actor is not the big transformation. It's thrilling if a performer can do that well, but that's not me. Often with actors, it's a case of witnessing a big party piece but wondering afterwards, where's the substance?
