I lived a dual life, and when my dual life exploded, I began to feel much happier.

I don't think I'll be doing a lot more commercials.

I do commercials, but I also go to Sudan as an ambassador for UNICEF.

Actually, I played Pontius Pilate as nice. An actor spends his life thinking he is Christ, and then he gets to play the character that killed him.

I think often there is great rivalry between neurosurgeons and cardiac surgeons. I think I maybe have a bit of bias with neurosurgeons' opinion that nothing tops neurosurgery! But that makes for a quite interesting conflict between the two.

My early ambitions were the same as they are now - to play for Manchester United. I was, and still am, football mad.

I started a French degree at university, but packed it in when I realised I really wanted to be an actor.

When I went to university, I was already working professionally with the Ulster Actors.

When people say, 'You're perceived as a sex symbol,' I love the idea of that because it's so absurd.

I spend an awful lot of time by myself and enjoy that.

Producers get very jittery about things.

My nightmare is that I don't want to be OK.

It's hard to make a film in Britain. It's hard to raise money. The best stuff that is shot on film in Britain is usually shot on film for television.

It's easier to act in your own accent.

You don't learn charm. It's not something that you can acquire. I have used it much in my life with great success, but it's not necessarily what makes me an actor. It became a very easy label to attach to me. It also feels a bit dismissive. People go, 'You're so lovely and charming', but it's a wee bit, 'That's all you are.'

Something about theatre perhaps scared me.

I'm not very good at standard English.

I've never felt that acting was my vocation - never had that tortured thing. I love acting, but it doesn't feed my soul.

Before I read the 'Bloody Sunday' script, I have to admit I hadn't thought about it that much. There was probably even part of me which assumed there was no smoke without fire. That the Catholics who were shot must have done something to provoke such a response from the army. I was extremely ignorant of the whole situation.

When you're brought up in a Unionist culture, you can't help but feel Unionist.

The whole process of making 'Bloody Sunday' was difficult but extraordinary.

I get an awful lot of people coming up and saying they went to school with me. There must have been 80,000 pupils at that school!

It's easy to get carried away with yourself.

When I did the film 'Hear My Voice' a few years ago, I disappeared fully up my own backside for a while. Because I thought my career was taking off, I became a bit of an egomaniac and a pain in the neck. I thought I was God's gift to mankind and the greatest Irishman since George Best.

My mother certainly doesn't think I'm charming!

Who am I to pass judgment? Judgment has been passed on me, but I adhere to, 'Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.'

'Spoilt' is a euphemism for 'loved.'

You can get a bit world-weary in this job, and 'The Passion' reminded me of what a fantastic job acting is and how lucky I am to be doing it.

If you are a Northern Irish actor, maybe subconsciously more than consciously, you do have an instinctive responsibility at some point to tackle the recent history of where we have come from. It's not only a responsibility, but a privilege.

I'm no pin-up.

Ever since I left Northern Ireland, I've always been pretty comfortable on my own, which contradicts a lot of people's perceptions of me.

When you see a tumour in the brain, it's an ugly looking thing. It's kind of black, grisly and messy. Or it can be white. To see it taken away is just amazing.

My agent Sue realised after 'Cold Feet' that I could have spent the rest of my life doing similar roles. So she was instrumental in moving me away from that.

Tumours can come out of nowhere.

Although surgeons know how to deal with bits of the brain, they don't really know how it works.

There's no such thing as unwanted attention for an actor.

The best way of enjoying your money is to spend it on other people. I don't need much.

Acting is something you didn't do in Ireland.

I think teaching should be a vocation, and they should be paid more for it.

I actually started out on the stage as a singer.

Some actors can distance themselves from the parts they play, but I fall into the category who use bits of themselves.

Love your parents, but don't have them as your mates.

I've always been a family man and count myself as one of those who are lucky to have the comfort of a family.

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle.

Making loans and fighting poverty are normally two of the least glamorous pursuits around, but put the two together and you have an economic innovation that has become not just popular but downright chic. The innovation - microfinance - involves making small loans to poor entrepreneurs, usually in developing countries.

Medical tourism can be considered a kind of import: instead of the product coming to the consumer, as it does with cars or sneakers, the consumer is going to the product.

What corporations fear is the phenomenon now known, rather inelegantly, as 'commoditization.' What the term means is simply the conversion of the market for a given product into a commodity market, which is characterized by declining prices and profit margins, increasing competition, and lowered barriers to entry.

Political risk is hard to manage because so much comes down to the personal choices of policymakers, whether prime ministers or heads of central banks.

The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.

In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your work force while keeping your business the same, and doing so not by investments in productivity-enhancing technology, but by making people pull 80-hour weeks and bringing in temps to fill the gap.