Paterson Joseph

When I got to secondary school I copped out and started bunking off.

The black presence in our British history has sometimes wilfully, sometimes neglectfully, been whitewashed out of our national tale.

For casting purposes, it seems I was born in the wrong skin.

It sometimes feels that I was born in the wrong time.

I don't feel guilty about much.

I wasn't a bully, I wasn't horrible, but a lot of teachers just took against me. I think it was because, in the late 60s, there weren't a lot of pupils who looked like me.

I don't know any black actors who are as short as I am.

I deplore people who can't keep their word.

I did Shakespeare with teenagers in Harlesden, and it transformed them. I did it with prisoners in Brixton and it inspired them to write sonnets about love, loss, time. The guy is... magical.

I was reluctant to play Othello. It seemed like such a 'black actor' cliche, but when I finally did, in my 40s, I related to him deeply - his brittleness, his ability to fall into an all-encompassing love. I could see where the madness could get in.

Shakespeare taught me everything I know about love. Its vibrancy. How afterwards your life seems darker. And everything I know about power, too - about the selfishness of ambition.

You can transform somebody just by telling them, 'I'm listening.'

I spent most of my time in libraries or Brent Cross shopping centre. I didn't understand what school was about. I was just lost.

Drama must give us a view not just of what was, but of what could be.

About two months after I'd finished filming 'The Beach' in Thailand, I found myself on a roof in Croydon at 2:00 A.M. in the rain with one spotlight on me, a student director and her technician trying to film me as an angel who'd fallen from the sky. Then the lights went out. And I thought, 'Yeah, you're back.'

My career started off very well in classical theatre, a genre that I shouldn't perhaps have done so well in. As a result it became clear to me that I had a bit of an outlier status. I was never part of the black theatre scene, for example.

In a life where you are oppressed and not listened to, and told to sit in the corner and shut up, which is the life I've led, to feel the appreciation of an audience can mean a huge amount.

We have fixed ideas of Tudor Britain, Victorian and Edwardian Britain as entirely white. But an awful lot of what we know as history was curated by racists. There is no other word for it.

The marvellous thing about Proust - although it must have been a nightmare living in his head - is he forgot nothing. His obsession with detail is extraordinary, the way the sun plays on a room, the smell of the air. He's like Van Gogh, seeing things in a way that no one else has seen them before.

It was the only thing I could do at school: I was rubbish at everything else but I could read aloud. It was the only thing I didn't get caned for or told I was stupid. So I've loved doing it all my life.

There's a desire now to have multi-ethnic casts in many, many things, even in costume drama, which I'm very, very pleased about.

I always thought of Doctor Who as being an older guy - Jon Pertwee was mine - older than me now and somehow slightly dangerous. You need him to get through these situations because of everything he's seen and experienced, but you can never quite trust him or ever really know what he's thinking.

I love the Olivier. It's a great space for me because I'm a big actor.

The first time I went to see theatre, I was in it.

I'm so keen to convey what I'm thinking and feeling, as opposed to letting the audience come to me.

I'm from London and I had never seen the sea until I was about 15, when I went on a trip to Littlehampton.

I don't have anything against someone going to the biggest market in the world for the job that we do. What I don't want there to be is talent drain, particularly among excellent black practitioners, because other, younger practitioners have no one to look to.

Dialogue's brave, brilliant and eclectic list is one that I am very privileged to be joining and I look forward to an exciting collaboration with this pioneering company.

Why are British actors revered in America? Because it's a place of excellence. This is where we are trained to be excellent. There's a richness here.

Just because somebody is a racist, it doesn't mean they are not human. It just means that they perhaps have had a certain upbringing, or have had things reinforced, that have made them ignorant of 'the other.'

It's interesting to think that somebody could be a virulent racist... but actually that doesn't make somebody inhuman. It just means that they've got a world view that is perhaps not acceptable to those of us who find that anathema.

My curiosity and my academic side only really came through outside of school life.

That's the mentality of the soldier. You act on order, not on your own cognition.

People who are racist, they love, they laugh, they are committed to their family and their friends. They're human beings. This is what's so difficult about it. They've got a mental block. They've been conditioned.

Racism is a strange mental illness where you look at somebody and say, 'I hate you because of the colour of your skin.'

I stayed in some lovely hotels in Thailand, especially the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok. It was very peaceful and really well done. It also had food to die for and the staff were incredibly polite.

I'm definitely not an adrenalin junkie; I get enough of that at work. Holidays are always a matter of relaxing and spending time doing nothing. I like to eat and drink and not worry about it.

That the whole world is not the West and that there are other ways of doing things, whether it's eating, seeing or valuing life.

When I do TV, I always look at it afterwards and realise that I'm more of a theatre actor.

The black presence in our British history has sometimes wilfully, sometimes neglectfully, been whitewashed out of our national tale. This is not only deeply hurtful and enraging, but also foolish in the extreme.

Why can I not get seen for parts in 'Emma,' 'Great Expectations,' or 'Downton Abbey?' Is it because I'm not 'the right kind of actor'? Or just the wrong colour of actor?

I expect most actors would admit to a touch of jealousy, or healthy envy, if they see fellow actors in an excellent piece of work on TV or in the theatre.

As an actor, I want to be in works that reflect black presence in the U.K. throughout the nation's history.

I think the god of acting is kind to me.

Great African-American stars who can command major theatre and film roles in successful international projects are not uncommon: James Earl Jones, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Whoopi Goldberg and Jamie Foxx, to name just a few.

As I know from my own experience, I may have the skill and the training to wield, say, a Bronte hero's finely turned phrases, but it'll be a cold day in hell when I'm even in the room for the Mr. Darcy auditions.

British theatre is marginally better at casting the actor the director wants regardless of colour, but TV has always, falsely I believe, seen itself as the arbiter of verite.

I hope my play, 'Sancho,' will contribute a little to an understanding of our shared British history, whoever we are.

What I thought about multi-ethnic Britain pre-Windrush and what I now know has, for me, changed for ever the meaning of the words black British.

I wanted to be in a costume drama. Yes, I like them. I enjoy the leap of imagination and the richer-than-modern-language they often contain. I wanted to wear a ruff, or an ornate waistcoat, even a foppish, stylish wig. But not as a tray-toting, background figure. I wanted to be a protagonist.