I come from a council estate in Tower Hamlets, and by no means am I the only person who has done well - one of my friends is head of year in a great school in Twickenham. Another is a writer; another is an artist, a musician.

My career is playing the guys who go, 'Boo.' That's what I do.

If your character doesn't express himself or doesn't feel confident expressing himself, then you don't express yourself.

I know what I try to do. I try to be professional, turn up, not make too much fuss, do the job.

I have my career and my family, and that's it.

You turn up on set, and somebody who has come out of Oxford, has done a BBC course, is telling you how to act. You think, 'Do me a favour. Go and make a coffee.'

I didn't do well at school, and I don't have lots of academic reference points.

I knew very early on that I wasn't Brad Pitt.

I knew what kind of actor I was going to be, and I looked for inspiration to people like Alec Guinness, Cyril Cusack, Timothy Spall and Jim Broadbent. I looked at them and thought, 'They play human beings as they really are.'

As children, we all hold on to the myth of omnipotence. Comics are successful because kids identify with superheroes. They'll read a book or watch a TV programme and say, 'I'm that guy.' And that guy is always the one in control.

'Ray Donovan' is very dark and very serious. As actors will tell you, the darker and more serious the material, the more jokes that go around set. It's a counterbalance.

The hardest thing to do and most miserable films are comedies.

I'm very blue collar myself. So it was easy for me to embody that in a sense. It's much harder for me to embody Norrell than it is to embody Terry Donovan.

I'm a great believer that actors are very similar to session musicians. You wouldn't ask a session musician, 'How do you play jazz,' and then, 'How do you play classical?' They just do it, because if they don't do it, they don't eat.

Art is the job of the privileged.

You can't write a screenplay if you've been doing a zero-hours contract. Which means that the people who write drama, the people who commission dramas, and the people who direct dramas all come from a small circle of society.

You're not going to have something set on a council estate that explores all elements of human existence, the variety of experience inherent in any community.

I always define egotistical thoughts as the thoughts I think other people have of me.

If you leave me waiting 'round for hours and then call on me to do something, I need to be able to do it straight away. That's my job, like your job is to do what you do.

When I first started doing press, one of the things people started pushing was this idea that I'd somehow escaped something. And I was really offended, because I hadn't escaped anything.

My friends I grew up with were so supportive to me. And I'm not the only one who's done well.

I wasn't that hard. I wasn't that tough. I wasn't that funny - I looked like me.

Acting was a way of me finding myself, which I think is the case of a lot of actors, regardless of where they come from.

Paddy Considine is a great friend of mine, and he is a natural actor because he is an artist, and I'm not an artist. If I ever blow my own trumpet, it's as a craftsman.

I get a lot of people saying to me, 'Oh, you're the actor who plays the nutters,' and I'm not. I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.

I listen to a lot of jazz. I'm a big Sinatra geek. I love Chet Baker.

I had a good job as a printer in the East End. Before the unions destroyed it, that job was very lucrative.

Major film stars tend to do a film and then have a couple of months off. I'm not a major film star; I'm a jobbing actor.

In my family, there was no celebration of ignorance. They'd come and see Chekhov or Shakespeare. I've got a sister who got a first in her degree. We don't sit around watching TV all the time.