I really loved working with Michael Caine. He's a really skilled and experienced actor. I learn something from everybody, but when you work with somebody like that, you actually learn things you can put in your toolbox, things about craft. Not necessarily life lessons, but actual things he knows that you can pick up.

When I got the offer to do 'Weird Ernie' in the pilot, I was living in New York, and somebody had made a mistake, and they made an offer that was supposed to be $2,500 for the job, but they offered $25,000. I couldn't turn that down. I'd never heard of anything like that!

One of the defense mechanisms I have for the difficulties in the business, one of which is rejection, is that if I do the work, I go in, and I'm prepared and I audition and they don't hire me, I'm always just amazed, thinking, 'Wow! For that money, they could've had Bruce McGill, and they didn't take me? I just think that's amazing.'

There's a cumulative effect to getting good parts as a freelance actor, because you're only as good as your last job, and you have to keep going out and getting them. Unless you're part of the finance structure, by which I mean a bankable star, which I never was and never will be.

I'm not the guy with the enormous comedy nose or the big feet or the bad posture or the whatever; a physical comic has certain things.

British politics, as the world knows, is a joke. Yet it's rarely funny.

My parents are really funny. Laughter was a big part of my childhood. Of course, they tell a lot of bad jokes - but so do I. I tell a lot of bad jokes.

The male image has been so pulled down by situation comedy in the last 15 years, it is frightening. I don't like what has happened to the American male.