"I think making films is brilliant. Going on location is amazing, hanging about with all these film people doing their thing."

"I just hope I won't do just any film to become a star. I just want to carry on working, acting."

"When I was watching him on the television or on the stage I was just so mesmerized that this guy-myuncle-was doing that, it fascinated me."

"I wasn't interested in school. I got into trouble all the time and they kept saying: Attitiude problem. I was unaware I had one because I had one, and it was starting to embarass my father."

"It's not always an easy thing to be told by your son, 'I'm going to be an actor.' I don't think it was an easy thing for them to hear but they were always right behind me."

"I had left home and was working in the theater as a scene changer. I didn't know what acting was. As far as I knew, it was remembering words."

"When I was in drama school I used to work on farms in the holiday and that was hard work. It was quite good to work with [your head] all the time and then to go away and work with your arms...I worked on a fishfarm once, and I was a car valet. I used to polish BMW's."

"I'm so driven, working madly, and almost arrogantly ambitious. But I've never known towards where or what."

"I didn't ever have to do those struggling years. I'm not guilty about it anyway, a lot of actors want you to feel guilty about that. I didn't get the job to be unemployed and I've learned a lot from every job I've done ever since."

"I thought that when the first episode of Lipstick on Your Collar aired my life would change dramatically. I remember counting the days to the first transmission. But when it was screened nothing happened. Nobody recognized me. I didn't get mobbed. It was a huge anticlimax."

"We didn't really do any drugs because there weren't any to be had. I missed the whole rave scene and the Ecstasy culture in the late eightie. It's quite sad. They really got the wrong guy for the job: Ewan 'Mr. Nae [No] Drugs' McGregor."

"It's like asking do you think of yourself as a sexy person. There is no answer to these questions. I don't waste my time imagining myself as these things. They are things people can think of you as."

"People are incredibly rude about it sometimes. Like, 'What? You're married?' Strange reaction to have. Proves what people's ideas about marriage are. 'We're having a baby.' 'What?' As if it's the end of the world. Of course, it's the start of a brilliant world."

"I'm naked a lot of the time, and they don't try to frame potted plants in front of me like they do in most other films. It's all part of the story...I've been naked in almost everything I've been in, really. {laughing} I have it written into my contract."