Winning is something you've dreamed about and hoped for, so that when you get there it's no big deal. But if you lose, you're gutted, and the gutted sense just goes on, and I know what that's like, because I've been having that gutted feeling since 1979.
When I see David Attenborough talking about how chimps live, big apes, I just remember my dad and the way he'd look at you. He couldn't speak, but everything else about him was, 'This is us, a family.' Relationships are just as intense as they are for people who can speak. Probably more so.
Some bloke came up to me in Tesco a couple of years ago at 11:30 pm and said: 'Excuse me, would you mind telling my son here that you're Uncle Vernon?' I said: 'Get a grip. It's 11:30 at night - what's he doing out of bed? I'm not here to entertain people at this time of night.
Since puberty I've always had this strange awareness that all the keener experiences I would have in my life would happen later than it would to my contemporaries. When it came to the career thing, I never worried about it. It's better if you're still peaking when you're 60, which I feel I am.
I've always turned down stuff where you had to be fat. I may be fat, but that's not why you play a role. If the guy has to be that way, I say get somebody else because I'm not doing any fat acting.
I know I have this kind of teaching element in me, but I don't want to become a 'teacher of theater' because that would formalize something that I'd much rather keep casual.
Every time I've talked about my family in the past, people have ended up getting upset. So I said to my friends and family: 'I shan't refer to you at all, and there's nothing for you to get upset about. There's the deal.'
Broadway has the most savvy audience anywhere. They see everything and they know their theater. As sophisticated and subtle as you think you can be, the houses you get here will want something finer.
What can I say? I deal with it. I think I have come to terms with my absolutely hateful and vile childhood. No, I have, really. But I did hate it at the time. I resented it. There were elements of it that were positively Dickensian.
It's been the most astonishing year because I've been having a marvelous adventure, and yet I kind of sympathize with people who have to live in exile, because I've so missed England.
I trained as an artist originally, so I know what a nice human body looks like, and I would like to look like that notion, and of course I never will. But I've got past that.
