Quotes from Roger Allam

Shakespeare is the best writing ever. It's incredibly rich, dense, expressive language.

I loved the variety of acting: turning your hand to different things and bringing whoever you were to it. There is something almost amateurish about it that appealed to me.

I like to do a wide variety of things, and acting, particularly in the theatre, has given me that opportunity.

When you are doing pantomime, you're not immersing yourself in anything terribly deep.

At one stage, I wanted to be a folk singer.

I have a glass of wine. Red. Generally when I'm cooking.

I don't know who can constantly afford to go and see things. A play, which has five people in it and one set and it cost you 60 quid? And you're in a theatre that really hasn't had a great deal of money spent on it in the last 50 or 60 years? It's kind of weird.

I came to theatre as a teenager by going to the National Theatre when it was at the Old Vic and sitting on padded seats in the gallery for 15 pence, which was the price of a bus fare.

The main thing about the Globe is there's 700 people all standing right in front of you.

It's glorious to get all your food shopping without having to set foot in Tesco.

In the theatre, there were plenty of people having sex all over the place - wanting to, and doing it quite successfully - but male violence? Personally, I have witnessed very little. Very, very little.

I don't get mobbed in the street or bothered. Well, people do stop and say nice things. 'I like 'Endeavour,' or, 'I loved The Thick of It.'

People are just repeating mantras like, 'get Brexit done,' 'strong and stable,' 'dither and delay'. There must be a way of satirizing it, and I long to see it, but it's gone beyond 'The Thick of It.'

It's curious that apart from the baroque ranting, 'Sarah & Duck' is very similar to 'The Thick Of It' - great characters, excellent writing and lots of humor!

I began getting these terrible headaches and I thought 'Oh great, death.' But it was just tension and tiredness.

That's the extraordinary thing about opera: it has the power to elicit a physical reaction. I don't know if I'd have been any good or not, but I do know that I was never committed enough to find out.

I was in 'Babes in the Wood' at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow in the Eighties. I was the villain - the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham.

Bizarrely, someone involved in the children's show 'Sarah and Duck,' which I narrate, recently found a coat with my name on it in a secondhand shop. It's the coat I wore as Theseus in the 'Dream.' So it's back in my possession after all these years, which is rather strange and wonderful.

My parents both came from working-class backgrounds, my father particularly. He came from a very poor family, 12 of them lived in a little three-bedroom terrace house in Fulham, it was very small with an outside loo and a tin bath on the scullery wall.

But one of the satisfying things about performing a play is you know for that piece of time exactly what you're going to be doing. Your life has a physical pattern. There's something about the odd, repetitious nature of it that I find hugely relaxing. All the problems of life are taken care of for that bit of time.

I had a serious and rather drunken research session with the great Charles MacLean, who took me through the history of whisky and malts. I can't remember a thing about it now. In fact I don't think I remembered a thing about it the following morning. Very, very entertaining.

There's a particularly British way of going about things that I rather like, which is very different to the American way. It comes out of the amateur rep tradition of actors thinking: 'Well, I'm only 26, but I'll put on a beard and have a go at King Lear.'

One of the great things about doing a play, repeating it over and over again, is that you can practice. And you can get really quite good at it for a while.

Getting a good education was of immense importance to my parents.