Martin Freeman
My job as an actor is for you, so why should my private life be for you, too? That's not fair.
There are about 20 people in my life that I want to love me, and none of them are the 'Daily Mail.'
My main priority in any job is when is the soonest I can get back to the three people I love most in the world.
I wasn't like a Fifties dad.
If it were purely up to me, my kids would probably be vegetarian Catholic Marxists.
I like life to surprise me.
It's more fun to keep stuff secret.
I like the idea of not everything happening between two human beings to be everyone's property.
Without sounding overly pompous about it, I don't really trust certainty in anything, actually. Especially as I get older. Except love. I'm certain of love, I guess.
There's a difference between the parts that I play and who I am and who people think I am. There's quite a big discrepancy sometimes between those things.
I hadn't grown up with 'The Hobbit;' I hadn't grown up with 'Lord of The Rings,' anything like that.
I like being called 'Mr. Freeman' occasionally.
I grew up in the suburbs, so I remember arriving at Waterloo and seeing Big Ben and the coloured lights on top of the Southbank Centre and thinking, 'Wow!'
Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay and Al Pacino made me want to act. I've always been interested in men with a vulnerable side.
To my mind there are not enough things that show the Nazis as human, as smart people, charismatic people, who are not inhuman naturally. But who are able to be fantastically inhuman when they choose to be.
The best of American television is thought-provoking, original, brilliant, exciting - from 'The Sopranos' on, whether it's 'The Wire' or 'Breaking Bad' or 'House of Cards,' they're fantastic pieces of art.
Television is where the great movies that used to exist have gone.
As soon as a job finishes, I am done with it. When I'm really, really enjoying the job, I love the job, I want it to end because it's supposed to.
Not all art is great; most of it's rubbish.
If I could get bands to come and play in my house, I'd like that.
I've been doing interviews for years, and in all that time, I've virtually never read one and gone, 'Yep, factually and tonally that's exactly what happened.' Pretty much never.
I'm very proud of 'The Office' - it was one of the best things I'll ever do. But you do become a slight victim of your own success in the sense that people think that's you, that's what you are, and that's what you'll play forever.
Trouble is, some accents lend themselves to comedy.
I like talky scenes.
The Marx Brothers isn't subtle, and that's hilarious.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of things American - but when American people do British stuff, it's so universally dreadful.
I can't actually believe how good 'The Sopranos' is. I genuinely am dumbfounded by it. It's like when you realize how good The Beatles are, and you think, 'How did they do that?'
I don't want to be alone; the thing I love about acting is the other people you're doing it with.
You have to, in a way, just get your head down and do the work and not expect every day to bring riches and not expect every minute to bring wild excitement, 'cause it just doesn't. It doesn't on films, anyway.
We all know that people who've never been on a film set think it's way more glamorous than the people who work on them.
I love the smaller scenes. I love the smaller, slightly more theatrical scenes.
Acting is reacting, and it's always easier to react when someone is doing a good job.
I have played nasty people, but not everyone has seen that stuff. Before 'The Office,' I mainly got cast as little toe-rags.
I'm not a writer, director or producer.
I work in public.
I could say, 'I want to play a French-African humpback,' but I probably won't get that role.
I did a play once where a reviewer said, 'Martin Freeman's too nice to play a bad guy.' And I thought: 'Well, bad guys aren't always bad guys, you know?' When I see someone play the obvious villain, I know it's false.
You're not fully you until life has booted you in the behind.
There are always challenges to green screen.
I've not been called on to do a lot of accent work.
My ambition is to do what I like and to do good things that I might not have done before.
My first engagement with any art was music.
As an actor, you know there are things you get asked to do that you do quite well, with less effort.
Although there's an inherent light-heartedness to 'Sherlock,' I slightly err towards not doing the comedy.
Please God, I'll never be in a war zone, but everything I sort of know about people who come back is that it's a hard transition to make. I mean, even if you've not been in a war, even if you've just been in the Forces, you come back and probably have more fights in civilian life.
On the surface, you think you wouldn't have to think at all about being asked to play Bilbo in 'The Hobbit.' It's not prison; it's a good gig. But you know it's going to take a long time, and it does. There are times when you thought: 'Gee, I've not seen my house for months.'
It's more fun playing someone who isn't just a bad guy.
I've tried not to treat Shakespeare as a marble giant.
What makes Shakespeare eternal is his grasp of psychology. He knew how to nail stuff about us as human beings.