Top 17 Douglas Hodge Quotes

For a time, I really thought acting was just impersonating. But impersonation is just big brush strokes, really. What makes acting different is empathy.

I’ve been doing a little project with my 11-year-old son, Charlie: we’re canoeing from the source of the Thames to the Houses of Parliament. It’s taken us three years so far, and we’re only half way.

When I did ‘Cyrano’ for Roundabout, I was originally supposed to direct and play the title role, but I quickly realized that was madness, and we called in Jamie Lloyd, who directed me in Osborne’s ‘Inadmissible Evidence.’

It’s pretty hard to play ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with someone and not fall in love.

I can’t stand interpretation. I think it’s one of the great scourges of the theater. I just think, ‘Don’t get in the way of the play.’

I’m very prescriptive about my routine. Almost nothing changes: I have the same meal – pasta with Bolognese sauce – between shows; the person who dresses me stands on the same side every time; I take the same route to the stage. I’m very OCD about these things, as most actors are.

It doesn’t matter how big the set is or how florid the music is: if it doesn’t touch people’s hearts, then I don’t want to be in it.

I love filming in London. In New York, every street is familiar because you have seen it in a movie. They mythologise their own city. You’re forever trying to get down streets that have been blocked off because of shooting. In London, they don’t put up with it; they’re grumpy.

It just tends to be that the grass is always greener. If I’m doing a movie, I suddenly think, ‘Oh God, I wish I could just get a play script I could get my teeth into.’ If I’m doing eight shows a week in a West End musical, I think, ‘God, how lovely it would be to be in a TV series right now.’

To do eight shows a week saying exactly the same lines, you have to be obsessively perfecting it or utterly mindless.

The next Bond ought to be a woman or, at least, a black actor.

While I was in ‘Inadmissible Evidence’ at the Donmar, I was mugged at the HSBC ATM on Shaftesbury Avenue. I grabbed one of the men, and when the police arrived, they put both me and him against a wall until they worked out which of us was the criminal.

I haven’t watched telly for years.

I grew up in Gillingham in Kent, and my dad commuted to Victoria Station every day. I remember travelling in with him one day and the noise, the people, and the heat leaving me wide-eyed and grinning.

In England, I’ve had a more balanced career directing and acting. It can be quite difficult to juggle the two careers.

I’ve always written songs. I’d come home from school and play piano for hours on end, just banging around.

When you sit down and there’s nothing, and then you write a song and there’s something, that’s the most extraordinary feeling.