Zitat des Tages von Sylvester McCoy:
In acting, quite a lot of the time you're not the first choice. Usually, you're second or third. And it can turn out to be the best thing that ever happened. You get used to that.
They were the books to read, 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings.' A rite of passage going through life.
Theatre is the principal job of an actor. An actor's job is to tell a story to someone in a room. TV and film can be great and I really love doing it, but it is a different way of telling a story.
Now I'm old... maybe I'm still an eccentric hippie. There's a wonderful freedom in the eccentricity - you can go places, you can be wacky, and you don't have to be constrained. I think that's why people are eccentric - eccentricity is a weapon... and it's great!
On stage you look much larger than you are. You can have subtle changes of timing; how you place a punch line in a joke or movement or emotion according to an audience.
Variety has always been in my mind: to do something totally different. I've had a parallel career since the beginning. On one track, the TV and film, the other, theatre, but they never crossed.
I think back to my time in children's television, back in the 1970s, and the amount of innovation that was going on then. Because the mass market wasn't focused on it, so you had a freedom to do amazing things, like 'Vision On,' and 'Tiswas.'
As far as I'm concerned, Cate Blanchett is a goddess, but she's really down to earth. She's got all those Oscars, she's made all those amazing films and she could spend her whole life doing that, but what does she also do? She gives birth to three boys and creates her own theatre in Sydney.
As far as I'm concerned, an audience is an audience. Whether it's an audience in Hull or the National Theatre, that's who you play to. It's not money - it's good to get some, but that's not why I do it. You do it because you have to, to tell a story.
I once went to a 'Star Trek' convention by mistake - I thought I was going to a 'Doctor Who' one.