Stand-up came out of three things. Frustration, necessity and arrogance. I didn't have a great career ahead of me in anything. Someone literally said to me, 'You should try stand-up,' and took me to a venue.

You'll read things and say, this is a really good project and it's probably going to be a hit, but I can see 20 other people playing that part. You have to have some sense of ownership to do a good job and be married to it for ever.

When I go on the plane to fly home, I'm literally capable of forgetting what I do for a job. That also comes about because I choose to take massive breaks between projects, and because I choose to do this ridiculous thing of keeping home, home.

I always find that 90% of the performance, for me, is about what comes from inside.

There were no vampires of note in Western literature until about the 18th century. But they tell us where we park our anxieties, whether its over-powerful women, death or damnation. We make our own monsters.

Among other things they picked out a detail that Charles had been offered the Governorship of Hong Kong in its dying days by Thatcher in return for shutting up about the inner cities. He quite rightly in my view led the paper on this story.

It's good for actors to confront those things we have to act: panic, pain and death.

My dad was an agent for Met Life. In the '50s, I remember the mortality rate was something like - you had - 58 was the average age. Then it was moved up to 62, and then 65, 68.