James Purefoy

My pub was full of get-rich-quick schemes that never worked - scams, pyramid schemes. People trying to find a way to get themselves out of a rut.

I have to travel a lot for work.

I think the business affairs people at the studios get some kind of perverse satisfaction in finding the worst hotels for actors to stay in.

Airport security is a particular bugbear. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, while I can see that averting terrorism is manifestly important, the measures taken seem, simultaneously, absurd.

Ancient Rome was a violent place.

I'm a serial monogamist.

Acting is a way to escape who you are for a short period of time. It doesn't happen all the time , but every now and then, the sensation of being 'other' is very profound. You get this moment where you are no longer yourself. You lose consciousness of the crew or the audience... it's a thrilling moment. And even quite spiritual.

As you mature and gain a semblance of wisdom and a sense of what life is all about... this is by no means true of everyone, but a lot of actors like to escape themselves. Inhabiting another person's persona is often a good way of escaping yourself.

I wasn't accepted the first time I tried to get into drama school. I said, 'I'll give this one more shot... and if that doesn't work, I won't bang my head against this painful brick wall.'

I wanted somebody who had a heart and a soul, because Joe Carroll is soulless. There was nothing in there. He was a vacuum of a man.

When I was growing up, 'Butch and Sundance' was my absolute favorite film.

I grew up in a very rural community in England.

The first time I was ever on stage, I was naked at 17. It was very cold!

A voice and an accent are two very different things. The voice of a man is how he speaks from his heart, right in the middle of him... And then you stick an accent on top of that.

You were always told that if you worked hard, you would get somewhere. But so many people feel they have worked hard and they have nothing to show for it.

I love all things Apple and have done since 1996.

The East Texas accent is a famously difficult accent to do.

I do know Joe Lansdale has the most extraordinary voice you've ever heard in your life in terms of an accent that, when I started doing it, they had to go, 'Whoa, we need less.' But that's how he talks.

I ran into my old friend Michael Kenneth Williams, who I worked with on a show called 'The Philanthropist' for NBC. He was going to be doing this show called 'Hap and Leonard.' He was playing Leonard, and they were looking for somebody to play Hap.

Playing Mark Antony in 'Rome' will always be a favourite of mine because he was such an outrageously big and interesting character to play. Also, the fact that we were able, with that character, to find out and present the public with a biography of that man that had not been really seen before.

We shot the first season of 'Hap and Leonard' towards the end of the summer in Louisiana, in and around Baton Rouge. If anyone's been to Louisiana or comes from Louisiana, they know what the weather's like down there at that time of year: it's unbearably hot for an Englishman.

When you sign up for a show in the United States, it's six or seven years, generally speaking.

If you read Grimm's fairy tales, they're absolutely terrifying.

Horror of any kind is dependent on a certain amount of insecurity and paranoia from the audience. And it feeds on that and works on that.

I think, as an actor, I would find it a little run-of-the-mill doing procedurals where it's the same sort of thing week in and week out. Your character doesn't get to grow very much, which, purely from an actor's point of view, you want to see an arc of your character.

I was fortunate enough to do an HBO show, 'Rome,' in which my arc was built in by historical fact, and over the course of 22 episodes, we were able to tell the stories of these people. We had a beginning and middle and end, and as we went on, you changed every week.

You really need to learn how to turn it on for 'action' and off for 'cut.'

I am not a big fan of what I call 'ambient television,' which just washes through you in a very polite way. I like television that grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go.

Once you have kids, horror movies become too horrible to watch because you imagine your own children in those situations, so you stop watching them.

Somerset is where I call home, and where I feel most myself.

I was very unmotivated at school.

Violence is a very ugly thing. Violence is often so casual on film, and made to look so cool and so sexy, but violence is a repulsive, repugnant act that human beings inflict on each other. It shouldn't seem to be cool and sexy, ever really.

When you don't take what you have for granted, you constantly try to re-prove yourself to yourself rather than to other people.

All cult leaders are very good at supplying people with what they want and are missing in their lives, so they feel loved and that they belong.

We always have relationships in our lives with people we've fallen in love with, who come back into our lives, and we fall in love with them again and go, 'I shouldn't be doing this,' but you can't stop it.

I have no problem with television as a genre.

There are only a few TV networks that really invest in production in the way that I think they should. HBO, obviously, is one of them.

One of the great things about being an actor is that you have a completely different challenge every few months.

Decide very early on: do you want to be an actor or do you want to be famous? Because they're very different routes.

I really do want to just be able to sit in the corner of the pub with my friends... to just be an actor and still go to the supermarket and not get bothered.

If you find yourself always playing the villain, or if you find yourself being typecast into a corner where you're not happy then that's probably rather miserable, but if I have been typecast I am quite happy about it.

I think the older I get, the less I should be doing.

I do live a weirdly divided life, because I'm not a Hollywood superstar, I don't live on Malibu Beach, I don't do massive 'OK!' spreads, I don't go to premieres and parties that much.

Joe Carroll had a certain black comedy to him. But I think it's lovely playing a man who, in his heart and soul, is a gentle man. And he's wounded and complicated.

Hospitals are very extreme places - you can be in a maternity room one minute, and by someone's bedside as they're dying the next.

I really like playing people who are exciting to watch and who burn brightly.

Ring tones are just irritating, aren't they?

As an actor you have to get used to receiving gentle little pies in the face.

When I started acting, I used to read all the reviews.

One of the things I like about doing historical films is drawing the line between now and then.