Acting can be a very cruel mistress. It's not a meritocracy. In other walks of life, by being good at what you do, you can achieve success. That isn't always the case in this business. Every actor knows that.

If you think about Shakespeare, you remember Richard III and Macbeth before you remember Ferdinand, whose role is just to fall in love and be a bit of a wimp. I love the baddies. More important, though, is making the baddies somehow, weirdly, understood.

I studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which was founded by Laurence Olivier and has alumni like Jeremy Irons and Daniel Day Lewis. It's a very erudite institution; its ethos, really, was always theatre-based.

I was born in Islington and grew up in Islington, so Arsenal was all around me, and supporting them was kind of unavoidable. The first season I started going to watch them was when we did the Double in 1971, so my first heroes were Charlie George, Ray Kennedy, and John Radford.

My mother moved abroad when I was 11, my dad wasn't around from the time that I was a baby, so I was not the product of a family, but a product of observation - of watching what went on around me, of watching who I liked, what I didn't like, what I thought was good behavior and what I thought was bad behavior and tailoring myself accordingly.

It's great to have the chance to play a character before he goes to the dark side, or the yellow side if you will. Normally, you don't get that opportunity. The narrative of a movie usually demands that you are that guy from the start.

I loved English at school and realised I would enjoy studying plays. I got into Royal Holloway. They had a little studio theatre where we put on plays, and that's what I realised I wanted to do. So from there, I went to the Old Vic theatre school to learn how to do it properly.

I'm going to try to play some good guys for a while and just see how that is. It's hard to enjoy them as much as the bad guys, and the clothes are nowhere near as good. Good guys don't wear nice suits!

Funnily enough, I had a real giggle with Gary Oldman when we were doing an interview together for 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.' Because I joked I was probably the only British actor who wasn't in the 'Harry Potter' franchise. The same is true of 'Game of Thrones.' Also 'Star Wars.'

In the past, if I didn't work, I didn't eat but now I feel I can not work and I won't starve.

I had this extraordinarily bizarre moment when, two Fridays ago, my missus gave birth to our second child at 11am and by the same time the following day I was sitting around a table with Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio in Rabat in Morocco, rehearsing a scene we were going to shoot the next day.

The idea of transformation - playing something I'm not - is the bit I enjoy most about acting.

You sign for a sequel for everything these days, just in case, options. In the past, you avoided them like the plague because it meant somewhere down the road you couldn't take a job because you had to do a sequel. Now it's a feature of pretty much any feature you do.

All these portrayals we see of knights fighting must be absolute rubbish because knights in armour could literally have only had two or three blows and then they'd have had to sit down to have a cup of tea.

I'm very organized and tidy in my home life and I generally do something myself rather than farm it out to somebody else. I don't have an assistant or anything because I think I can do it myself.

Because I had children relatively late - in my 40s rather than in my 20s - it wasn't anything I ever knew that I would do. It kind of happened to me: I met the right woman and we had children. It was a revelation because it suddenly makes me realize, 'Oh, I get it. Now I know what to do with the rest of my life.'

And I think in your 40s, you land a little bit, physically and mentally, you arrive at a place where you feel you've learned some stuff. Having children at that point meant I had something very useful to do for the next 20 years.

You do a play, or you go on set for the first day of filming: if you don't have nerves, and you don't have any kind of adrenalin pushing you forward, then something is wrong.

When you're making a psychological thriller, what you need to do is have an audience on shifting sand so they're never quite sure where they are.

I have to say, when you make a movie, you really have no idea how it's going to turn out as an actor. The important bit for an actor is the actual shooting of it because the minute the shoot ends, it's got nothing to do with you anymore.

The fact that women are constantly supposed to be beautiful, gorgeous, and perfect all the time is something they have always had to live with. But now it's happening to men, too. There seems to be this imperative that you have to be hot or ripped or fit or healthy or whatever you want to call it.

My genes are such that I've always been relatively in shape.

I've never been one of those actors who plays chess with his career and goes, 'I'm going to wait now and see what project comes up that can move me to this or that level.' I take stuff as it comes, and it just so happens that it hasn't dried up yet, touch wood.

I was born in London, and my family is here. America is an interesting place, but it's incredibly different culturally. It doesn't take long being there before I want to get back.

I had fantasies of being a European lawyer, but I quickly realised I probably just had fantasies of wearing a raincoat and carrying a briefcase and driving a BMW. I thought that would be cool.

I can't imagine anything worse than being in a position that you're not allowed to live your life privately.

I do get antsy if I haven't got lines to learn, a character to play. But yes, I do take holidays.

I'm like anyone; I make a lot of my assumptions about actors I don't know from what I read about them. And then I'll find those judgments are often completely confounded when I meet them in real life.

No, I've never moved on with a play. I did the original 'Closer' in London but didn't transfer to the West End or Broadway with it. The same is true of 'Iceman': I didn't go to the Old Vic or Broadway with that. I don't know; I feel an allegiance often to the play where you do it first, in the theatre that it's in; you do it for that space.

Some jobs you do, they're just jobs. Others are life experiences.

My style icon has always been David Bowie. Just because of the variety of images and looks he created.

The person I respect most, in terms of historical figures, is probably Nelson Mandela. I just think that his tolerance in the face of extreme provocation is something every single person on the planet could learn from.

I've pretty much played every regional accent you can play in the U.K. I've played German, French, Arabic; I've been Jordanian, Lebanese. I've covered a lot of ground.

There is no part of me that wants to have to pull the blinds down when I'm talking to my wife about dinner because some photographer is in a bush outside.

As an only child, particularly if you're a boy without a father, you have to work out for yourself who you're going to be. And I do think, over the years, I've developed a need for control.

As an actor, that's what you want. You want variety. I want to try things that I'm not used to and push my own envelope and see what I'm capable of.

It's important to me that I don't spend too much time away from the family. I try to pick jobs that will keep me as close to home as possible or, if I have to go far away, for as little time as possible.

I'm sure, in real life, spying is boring - there's probably a lot of sitting around and plenty of paperwork. But the world seems to think that spying is exciting, and that's how movies get made.

I did perform in punk bands, but it was more about shouting and snarling than about any beautiful music. I enjoyed singing in 'The Golden Circle' - I've never sung in a movie before.

Listen - in life, if you can go into work and spend the day with Halle Berry, you're doing alright.

It's always interesting when you play a part and then suddenly people think you're an authority on the subject.

There have been things over the years that didn't work. 'Body Of Lies,' directed by Ridley Scott, which I did with Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio, is a really tight action thriller, but when it opened in the U.S. it was number two to 'Beverly Hills Chihuahua.'

You come out of drama school and do theatre and are interested in creative endeavour, then you drift into TV and movies and realise that artistic endeavour needs to balance with financial success. There's no point spending millions on a movie that doesn't make any money, because the people producing it won't make another one.

I love all those dark, twisty shows, but my favorite show at the moment is 'Girls.' I love watching it. I've forgot how self-absorbed you can be at 21 years old or whatever.

Instantly when I'm acting, I kick into Frank Agnew face.

When I decided to crop what was left of my hair, I thought, 'It's all over. I'm never going to work again: it's basket weaving me for me from now on.' But what actually happens is your casting changes: you suddenly start to get a lot of villains and coppers and soldiers and even the odd sensitive vicar - you become institutionalised.

Every now and again, a script comes along that you just can't put down, and 'Deep State' is exactly that - a great example of the best kind of writing.

There's an honourable tradition of British actors who've gone to Hollywood playing baddies. Part of that is because we grow up with Richard III and Macbeth - we're not afraid of our villains.

I've always thought that speaking a foreign language from a young age makes you a little bolder when it comes to speaking and doing accents and things like that.

For me, family comes over and above everything.

When I talk to younger actors, and young people in general, who are holding off having children because they think they cannot fit them into their busy lives, I now know, and am able to say to them, 'You've just got to get on with it; there is never going to be a right time.'

I studied law, so perhaps I might have made it to the Bar, though I gave up that idea when I suspected playing a barrister was probably much more fun than being one.