Hollywood hasn`t aggressively pursued me. Neither have I aggressively pursued Hollywood.

[Of the movie version of `Mamma Mia` in which he stars] If you are the kind of person who always wanted to see middle aged men in tight spandex trying to sing, then this is the film for you.

As much as the next person, I want to be approved of, but I`m not greedy for that stuff.

I`d love to try my hand at something else.

Every single film since [Pride and Prejudice] there`s been a scene where someone goes, `Well I think you`ve just killed Mr Darcy`. But he is a figure that won`t die. He is wandering somewhere. I can`t control him. I tried to play with it in Bridget Jones. I`ve never resented it: if it wasn`t for him I might be languishing, but part of me thinks I should do this postmodern thing, change my name by deed poll to Mr Darcy. Then people can come up to me and say, `But you are not Mr Darcy` which would be different. I dare say it will be my saving grace when the only employment available to me is opening supermarkets dressed in breeches and a wig.

I do notice that when I`ve been away and I come back to London. People look at you. People are ready to pick arguments.

One of my grandfathers, actually, having gone out there as a minister, decided he would better serve the people as a doctor. So at a very late age - at the age of 38 in fact - he changed course and decided to become a doctor.

We`ve always been involved with America - I have a son who lives there and it`s a big part of my life.

To be bothered wherever you go - it`s not a rational thing to want at all.

I want to say, strenuously, that although I have never considered the Darcy thing to be a problem, that is simply not going to happen.

I don`t want to sound smug but I am reasonably satisfied with how it`s gone. I think it`s fine.

I do think I`m a character actor.

I think it`s quite extraordinary that people cast me as if I`m Warren Beatty: until I met my present wife, at the age of 35, you could name two girlfriends.

I was not quite as gracious as Mark Darcy about wearing what my mother tried to make me wear. It tended to stop really, when I was quite young.

I would rather five people knew my work and thought it was good work than five million knew me and were indifferent.

In this case it appealed to me partly because it felt close to me in some ways. This is about a confused, bewildered middle class Englishman adrift in smalltown America and that has definitely been me.

My looks aren`t something that come dazzlingly through in everything I do. I can be made to look one way or the other fairly easily... I am still not recognised on the street that much.

I haven`t had to struggle very much. I haven`t paid my dues. I think I have been lucky.

If you don`t mind haunting the margins, I think there is more freedom there.

People have the idea of missionaries as going out with the Bible and hitting natives with it. It`s not really what they were doing. They were all doing something rather different.

Most actors will tell you they have some sort of dream of doing something other than what they`re doing.

Almost every comedy you see is about people making all wrong choices and making all the errors of judgement possible. Good comedy is when it works on this scale. Because it is psychologically very real.

I think that London is very much like that. I find there`s humour in the air and people are interesting. And I think that it`s a place which is constantly surprising. The worst thing about it? I think it can be smug and aggressive.

The last thing I would attempt to do is to buy clothes for a child I didn`t know well.

I have a kind of neutrality, physically, which has helped me. I have a face that can be made to look a lot better - or a lot worse.

I have a very long relationship with America. My mother grew up there and I felt to some extent that I partly belong there. I was schooled there briefly for about a year.

If I want my career to go on, I`m going to have to find some more Fiennes brothers! However, any similarity between them basically stops at their last name. I was in no way reminded of Ralph by working with Joe. I got on fantastically with both of them. I have huge admiration for them as actors but I couldn`t compare them. (on losing the girl to both Ralph and Joe Fiennes)

It used to be that I was always paranoid or a loser or something so there`s usually something that you seem to associate yourself with at one time or another.

I think England has served me very well. I like living in London for the reasons I gave. I have absolutely no intentions of cutting those ties. There is absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly not, so that I can have a swimming pool and a palm tree.

Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering.

My grandmother was a minister as well, which was not that common in the 1930s.

[On the appeal he has to older female fans] I find I`m increasingly lusted after by people beyond pensionable age. I was told of a woman in hospital, diagnosed with high blood pressure, who was told not to watch any more `Pride and Prejudice`. She was 103.

I feel quite strongly about anti-Americanism. I share people`s grievances about the current Administration but I remember my father and I watching the Watergate hearings. Here was a country arraigning its own leaders. America has a fantastic history of dissent. (Sept. 2007)

I like playing strange characters. Some people might say it has something to do with a hidden part of myself, but I think it`s a lot simpler than that: normal people are just not very interesting.

The first actor who really blew me away was Paul Scofield in [the movie] A Man for All Seasons (1966). I`d never seen such integrity in acting, and it struck me as a fascinating paradox because acting is artifice. It can be argued to be entirely false. I thought, how can an actor suggest such truth?

I have a kind of neutrality, physically, which has helped me. I have a face that can be made to look a lot better or a lot worse, depending on how I want it to look.

"Well it doesn`t exactly have a ring to it, does it? It`s more the sort of name you`d give to your goldfish for a joke." [about his first name]

Forget "trying" to be sexy. That`s just gruesome.

[Talking about his success in playing the two Mr. Darcy roles] "I was delighted to become a popular-culture reference point. I`m still delighted about it actually, and I still find it to be weird."

"And I always thought the biggest failing of Americans was their lack of irony. They are very serious there! Naturally, there are exceptions...the Jewish, Italian, and Irish humor of the East Coast." (Italian Vogue)

The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I`m not denying they exist. But it`s a far more philistine country than people think.