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.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

If you're confident, then it helps you live up to your potential, but if you believe because you went to a certain school it means you're entitled to have a particular career, you'll fall flat on your face eventually.

Private education can give you confidence, which is marvellous; a sense of entitlement isn't.

When I was a struggling actor, I worked for a party company. One of my friends from school was working for an advertising agency, and I turned up to one of his company's parties dressed as an alien to collect tickets on the door.

When you watch 'Ray Donovan,' you think that it's about Hollywood, about scandal, about stars, and about trying to keep secrets. That's true, but that's also just the means by which you reveal secrets of the people suffering every day life.

I wouldn't have been interested in making a show just about Hollywood, 'cause I find Hollywood boring. I find people and families very interesting.

It's a very fascinating thing for an actor to play somebody who is suffering, and you have to express the suffering, but in an inarticulate way and sometimes a dysfunctional way, through violence.

I've got four kids - I unblock a toilet every day.

Mr. Norrell is like a librarian trying to do magic... That's the story of my career, really. I stand next to good looking men and make them look better!

I'm not a great fiction reader. I love history. I love history and philosophy.

I always think of Gilbert Norrell as being Salieri to Jonathan Strange being Mozart.

The characters in 'Ray Donovan' are not very articulate - we're the worst Irish family you could ever live next to in L.A.

I'm used to playing characters who have a lot to say but don't know how to say it.

I've got four kids to feed and a wife to provide for. It's a worry but a great responsibility as well and one I relish.

As a working-class actor, leaving school with no qualifications, being a printer and then becoming an actor and then working with people who to a certain extent had had a leg up. I never had that advantage. It's less an artistic need to express myself and more a need to prove myself.

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.