The bad boy: always more fun.
Ian McShane
My dad was a football player - a soccer player - for Manchester United, and I loved playing football, but I also happened to be the guy in class who was pretty good at sight reading. My teacher gave me scripts, and I was very comfortable.
Do you follow American politics? They hate Obama. Hate him. He's a black man. That's what it is: it's racist. This guy is no bleeding-heart liberal. He's a centrist.
I don't want to be in 'Expendables 5.' You can keep those kind of movies.
I enjoy every role I do.
What you do is, you just do the gig, enjoy, get on with it, and treat the rest as horse doodle.
There's only two kinds of actors - good ones and bad ones... and lucky ones and unlucky ones.
Mum and Dad were both happy for me to do what I wanted.
Acting is great therapy - you get to do things you'd normally get arrested for.
When you're in your early 20s, you go ahead and do everything. And it's very hard to judge yourself.
People tweet before they think, and it becomes obsessive.
If 'Deadwood' had gone on another two years, I wouldn't have got as many movies made.
The bad boys get all the best lines.
When you've done a show that's as successful as 'Lovejoy' was, it hangs around for a few years, and people know you from it. I escaped the shadow when I stopped 'Lovejoy' by not doing any television for four years.
I mean, I'm an actor. I do what comes along.
I'm from the disco era where everybody thought they were John Travolta... What song is going to get me on the dance floor? Anything from 'Saturday Night Fever,' and you're up there like a demon.
I come from the liberal side of thinking: Better one guilty man should walk free than one innocent man found guilty.
Every actor has to love and loathe the character he plays.
You don't particularly want to stay close to your ex-wife. Or why would she be your ex-wife?
I had a bit of a male menopause. It started at the age of 18 and continued until I was 45.
I don't do social media.
What 'Deadwood' did was to talk about how capitalism started, how civilised society came in, and how that brought its own problems.
Blackbeard is probably the most infamous pirate who ever lived. He's one of those characters for which most of your work is done before you start.
What's great about acting is you can let all your wackiness hang out while you work.
My daughter said, 'I don't think granddad really suits you.'
Acting's boring.
I'm a child of the Sixties.
I don't remember my first two marriages... the details are very sketchy.
Bosses will tell you they are looking for something different but they're not, actually.
As long as the cheques carry on coming in, and I'm enjoying my work, I shall continue acting.
Theater is a dance of a different kind, a dance of rawness and characters stripped down.
I don't believe in the death penalty, but I understand personal vengeance.
'Lovejoy' has a special place in my heart because it was through my efforts that the series first came to the screen.
Robert Fisk is my hero. In America, they think he's a terrorist.
My second marriage was to a girl I met in Manchester, kept a long-distance relationship going for two years, then we got married... disaster.
I never wanted a life of having a nice house, driving around, settling down.
I would like to be in a really big, successful film - boffo, spectacular, $500 million!
I think the reason 'Sexy Beast' was so good was it wasn't just another run-of-the-mill gangster film; it was a love story.
Whenever there was a pause on the 'Hercules' set, everybody whipped their Blackberries out of their skirts - 'Are you texting the King of Thrace to tell them we're on our way?'
You set paths for yourself, but as you get older, things change.
You don't know where life takes you.
Seventy years old! How did that happen? I was part of the generation that wasn't going to die.
When you're doing a medieval show like 'Pillars,' it starts off a bit like a school play. You're all in funny costumes; you've had your coffee, and you say, 'Good morning'. Then you go on set and, if you've got good actors and directors, it takes on a life of its own.
I had a teacher at school who said, 'We are going to do a play next year, and you're in it.' He said, 'You should try out for the Royal Academy as an actor.' I did and got in. I was 17. My mum wasn't too happy, but it worked out OK.
If I'd had the choice when I was 14, and someone had said to me, 'You can either be a footballer or an actor,' I'd have said: 'Well, can't I be a footballing actor?'
I don't think that acting is as youth-obsessed as the general culture. In acting, as you get older, you get better, and the parts you get improve, too. But that's only true for a man, not a woman.
I've never hankered for any role.
