Timothy Spall

I think anything that increases your understanding of the human condition... I think age and life, if you're lucky, makes you think deeper, and the other thing it makes you realize is that you never stop learning, and you never lose your fear of getting it wrong.

I know what I like when I see it, but no way have I ever become interested in learning about it.

It doesn't bother me one iota that most of my career has been playing people who are not that - well, let's say that people wouldn't aspire to be like them.

It's my job to manipulate feelings.

Because I can think rationally, I can think cosmically, and I can think about the world scientifically and poetically and the universe.

I don't enjoy the theatre. I don't go. Don't like going in the back door or the front.

My wife... now travels with me everywhere - not because she nearly lost me, but because my kids are all grown up and my son is now a very successful actor, Rafe Spall.

What character actors want to do is investigate new types of people and present them in all their idiosyncrasies, psychological complexities, and contradictory stupidities. That has been one of the great delights over our seven collaborations.

My job as a character actor is to make me fit the character, to serve the character. To present this human being who turns up in a piece of film or entertainment that's going, you know, exist as if it might exist after the film is finished and it existed before the film has started.

When I was born, my dad was a scaffolder, and my mum worked in a chip shop. Then my mum taught herself how to be a hairdresser and ended up with her own salon; my dad became a postman and then a counter clerk. Our first house didn't have a bathroom.

There's posh character actors. For God's sake, Olivier was one of the greatest character actors in the world. Hamlet, Shylock, Othello - Othello! Whether you like it or not.

If I can't get hold of someone I love, I'll assume they're being tied to a radiator by al-Qaeda rather than their battery's run out. I'm quite a worrier.