I did quite a lot of fencing when I was a kid. I was a swimmer, and I played a lot of basketball. I was a fencer for Great Britain, but I only did that because I watched 'Robin Hood,' 'Star Wars,' 'Highlander' and 'The Three Musketeers,' and I wanted to emulate Richard Harris and the great British actors that I grew up watching.

I always love being an actor for the simple fact that, whenever you do a job, you have to read a lot of stuff that you've never read before; you explore things, and generally you meet experts in lots of fields, and you get to absorb that information and make it look like you've done it for 20 years.

Beowulf is not a superhero. He has a talent, very much like Clint Eastwood in 'Unforgiven.' He's very good at staying calm in the right moment, but he does bad things. It's very much about having talent in a tight spot.

You've got something really angsty for me to play? Bring it on. Most of the time, I'm goofing around and doing impressions of people, so that's nice.

I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet.

I am sure it is one's duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

Isn't it interesting that markets are not just perfect? In business school and economic theory, you learn all about those perfect markets, and there's no such thing as a perfect market.

But instead of standing up for reason, our government is handing education over to the world of faith.