Quotes

• As much as possible, I try to encourage people to use stunt men because that is really their job.

• I can tell you where I was when Kennedy was shot - which was in the common room at school. I heard about it on the old valve radio. At the time of Armstrong's landing, I was at university rehearsing a play.

• I don't think I really have the insight or the inquiring to be an astronomer, and I don't think I have the wherewithal to be an astronaut. But if I had to choose which one I'd like to be, it would be the astronaut. I think it would be a wonderful thing to try.

• I enjoy some physical stuff. But if I had a choice between playing a scene where it's raining, it's terribly cold, I'm wet and I'm being drowned and playing a scene with dinosaur eggs in a laboratory, I'd probably take the latter. It's warmer and generally more comfortable!

• I go by the role pretty much. And I think the only genre I haven't gotten to do but I'd love to is a western, but no one has ever asked me to do that. Unfortunately they are very few and far between these days, but that is one type of film I'd love to do.

• I love the fact that you can't tell pinot noir what to do; it has to express itself. And it's always just beyond your grasp. If you do manage to get a hold of it, it's only for a fleeting moment.

• I'm not big on champagne, but I'd take along a bottle of Cristal to pop for when the boat comes to the rescue.

• I'm playing a cat burglar. I've made it. This is the high point of my career. I'm really chuffed.
  • Referring to his role on The Simpsons

• It's fairly hard to find gay drug dealers that aren't locked up or dead, or 23, so it's fairly oblique research. But I have some good contacts, not in the gay drug world but in the legal world, who spun me in the right direction.

• I've had the last four or five weeks off, and I'm at the vineyards most days. I'm kind of wasting my manager's time by pretending I know more than I do. Occasionally they let me loose on the ride-on mower, which is my principal contribution to the hands-on business. There comes a time in every man's life when certain things become inevitable. There's the ride-on mower, the prostate problems and pyjamas. I'm glad to say that the prostate isn't worrying me yet, but I have taken to pyjamas with considerable enthusiasm in the past couple of years. Stripey ones.

• I've worked all my life to shed myself of any character.

• The animatronics now are certainly more lifelike than before. They've advanced in exactly the same was as the CGI has. It is all really out of my area of expertise, but it definitely made my job a lot easier to act to something that was a lot more expressive, more real.

• There's part of me that loves travelling. And there's part of me that just loves staying home. It's a double-edged sword.

• They're so lifelike, I became curiously fond of them. There was one little female velociraptor who had a cute haircut, but it was never anything more than holding hands - holding claws.

• When I started in films, it never really occurred to me that I could make a career out of acting.

• When you hear actors say, 'Oh, I did all my own stunts,' it is usually crap! It's one thing jumping into water or whatever, but the real stunts are more properly done by stunt men. And it is too financially risky to have actors risk their necks, isn't it?