I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it's been something that I've always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.
One half of the pleasure experienced at a theatre arises from the spectator's sympathy with the rest of the audience, and, especially from his belief in their sympathy with him.
When a bishop at the first shot abandons the worship of Christ and rallies his flock round the altar of Mars, he may be acting patriotically... but that does not justify him in pretending...that Christ is, in effect, Mars.
Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.
I'm a geeky actor, in the way that I like the craft of acting. I trained as a stage actor and was given a lot of technical tools to play with. I like the craft of acting. It sounds geeky when I say it, but it's true.
I feel like a bit of a phony sometimes - I started acting because I didn’t know what else to do. I filled in all these university application forms and honestly didn’t want to do any of the courses.
We find the general work of mankind is being carried on from day to day by the mass of people acting in harmony as if by instinct. If they were instinctively violent, the world would end in no time.
I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.