When I talk to younger actors, and young people in general, who are holding off having children because they think they cannot fit them into their busy lives, I now know, and am able to say to them, 'You've just got to get on with it; there is never going to be a right time.'

Mark Strong

I studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which was founded by Laurence Olivier and has alumni like Jeremy Irons and Daniel Day Lewis. It's a very erudite institution; its ethos, really, was always theatre-based.

Mark Strong

I was born in Islington and grew up in Islington, so Arsenal was all around me, and supporting them was kind of unavoidable. The first season I started going to watch them was when we did the Double in 1971, so my first heroes were Charlie George, Ray Kennedy, and John Radford.

Mark Strong

There have been things over the years that didn't work. 'Body Of Lies,' directed by Ridley Scott, which I did with Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio, is a really tight action thriller, but when it opened in the U.S. it was number two to 'Beverly Hills Chihuahua.'

Mark Strong

If you think about Shakespeare, you remember Richard III and Macbeth before you remember Ferdinand, whose role is just to fall in love and be a bit of a wimp. I love the baddies. More important, though, is making the baddies somehow, weirdly, understood.

Mark Strong

The person I respect most, in terms of historical figures, is probably Nelson Mandela. I just think that his tolerance in the face of extreme provocation is something every single person on the planet could learn from.

Mark Strong

And I think in your 40s, you land a little bit, physically and mentally, you arrive at a place where you feel you've learned some stuff. Having children at that point meant I had something very useful to do for the next 20 years.

Mark Strong

I have to say, when you make a movie, you really have no idea how it's going to turn out as an actor. The important bit for an actor is the actual shooting of it because the minute the shoot ends, it's got nothing to do with you anymore.

Mark Strong

Every now and again, a script comes along that you just can't put down, and 'Deep State' is exactly that - a great example of the best kind of writing.

Mark Strong

I'm going to try to play some good guys for a while and just see how that is. It's hard to enjoy them as much as the bad guys, and the clothes are nowhere near as good. Good guys don't wear nice suits!

Mark Strong

I'm very organized and tidy in my home life and I generally do something myself rather than farm it out to somebody else. I don't have an assistant or anything because I think I can do it myself.

Mark Strong

I've always thought that speaking a foreign language from a young age makes you a little bolder when it comes to speaking and doing accents and things like that.

Mark Strong

I had this extraordinarily bizarre moment when, two Fridays ago, my missus gave birth to our second child at 11am and by the same time the following day I was sitting around a table with Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio in Rabat in Morocco, rehearsing a scene we were going to shoot the next day.

Mark Strong

My mother moved abroad when I was 11, my dad wasn't around from the time that I was a baby, so I was not the product of a family, but a product of observation - of watching what went on around me, of watching who I liked, what I didn't like, what I thought was good behavior and what I thought was bad behavior and tailoring myself accordingly.

Mark Strong

Acting can be a very cruel mistress. It's not a meritocracy. In other walks of life, by being good at what you do, you can achieve success. That isn't always the case in this business. Every actor knows that.

Mark Strong

I loved English at school and realised I would enjoy studying plays. I got into Royal Holloway. They had a little studio theatre where we put on plays, and that's what I realised I wanted to do. So from there, I went to the Old Vic theatre school to learn how to do it properly.

Mark Strong

No, I've never moved on with a play. I did the original 'Closer' in London but didn't transfer to the West End or Broadway with it. The same is true of 'Iceman': I didn't go to the Old Vic or Broadway with that. I don't know; I feel an allegiance often to the play where you do it first, in the theatre that it's in; you do it for that space.

Mark Strong

The idea of transformation - playing something I'm not - is the bit I enjoy most about acting.

Mark Strong

The fact that women are constantly supposed to be beautiful, gorgeous, and perfect all the time is something they have always had to live with. But now it's happening to men, too. There seems to be this imperative that you have to be hot or ripped or fit or healthy or whatever you want to call it.

Mark Strong

You come out of drama school and do theatre and are interested in creative endeavour, then you drift into TV and movies and realise that artistic endeavour needs to balance with financial success. There's no point spending millions on a movie that doesn't make any money, because the people producing it won't make another one.

Mark Strong

When you're making a psychological thriller, what you need to do is have an audience on shifting sand so they're never quite sure where they are.

Mark Strong