Quotes from James Nesbitt

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

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.'

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 want to beat up Michael Fassbender in a movie. I was with him at the beginning of his career when he did an episode of 'Murphy's Law.' He's a proper superstar and enormously talented, but I want to do a scene where I properly duff him up.

Belfast is a city which, while not forgetting its past, is living comfortably with its present and looking forward to its future.

I've never thought of myself as a classic leading man. I'm a character actor who happens to play leading roles. Come on, look at me. I'm really Desperate Dan.

As I told Piers Morgan, 'Catholics have confession, whereas Northern Irish Protestants only have interviews.'

That thing of briefly losing sight of a child happened to me when the kids were younger, and you can't see them in the supermarket or wherever. It's a terrible, terrible moment... the most unimaginable horror.

Producers get very jittery about things.

There's some irony in playing a journalist after some of the stuff that has been written about me, but it's a great profession, particularly investigative journalism.

I've got a history in my life of difficult times.

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

As fabulous as technology is, it can also make us very anxious.

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

The reality of life in Northern Ireland is that if you were Protestant, you learned British history, and if you were Catholic, you learned Irish history in school.

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

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.'

A lot of people of my Ulster Protestant background would have been very suspicious of the notion of a film about Bloody Sunday. Our fear would have been that it would be terribly anti-Britain and anti-soldiers: a piece of nationalist propaganda.

In my life, I have made the occasional catastrophic choice, and it's just a case of moving on and learning from it.

Several years ago, I began losing my hair, and like a lot of men, it was a major concern to me, in fact it was practically an obsession. But, also I'm an actor, so I'm in the public eye a lot and I really felt that my hair loss could affect my career prospects.

I am in the public eye, and I accept that my actions may be open to question.

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!

We have to get behind the scientists and push for a dementia breakthrough. It could be that we fear dementia out of a sense of hopelessness, but there is hope, and it rests in the hands of our scientists.

Perhaps our imagination needs crime stories to fulfill some craving we have, as a way to assuage a darkness in ourselves.