Quotes from James Purefoy

I grew up in a very rural community in England.

I wasn't accepted the first time I tried to get into drama school. I said, 'I'll give this one more shot... and if that doesn't work, I won't bang my head against this painful brick wall.'

Horror of any kind is dependent on a certain amount of insecurity and paranoia from the audience. And it feeds on that and works on that.

If you look around us, there are an awful lot of men out there, and women, but mostly men, who believe that they have got a fast-track path to Heaven, if they do the things that they believe God is telling them to do, and I don't just mean Islamic people. I mean Fundamentalist Christians.

As you mature and gain a semblance of wisdom and a sense of what life is all about... this is by no means true of everyone, but a lot of actors like to escape themselves. Inhabiting another person's persona is often a good way of escaping yourself.

When I was growing up, 'Butch and Sundance' was my absolute favorite film.

I have to travel a lot for work.

Violence is a very ugly thing. Violence is often so casual on film, and made to look so cool and so sexy, but violence is a repulsive, repugnant act that human beings inflict on each other. It shouldn't seem to be cool and sexy, ever really.

Decide very early on: do you want to be an actor or do you want to be famous? Because they're very different routes.

I really do want to just be able to sit in the corner of the pub with my friends... to just be an actor and still go to the supermarket and not get bothered.

I do live a weirdly divided life, because I'm not a Hollywood superstar, I don't live on Malibu Beach, I don't do massive 'OK!' spreads, I don't go to premieres and parties that much.

One of the great things about drama is that it makes you feel like you're not a crackpot, and that there are other people who think and feel the way you do.

I really like playing people who are exciting to watch and who burn brightly.

Hospitals are very extreme places - you can be in a maternity room one minute, and by someone's bedside as they're dying the next.

We shot the first season of 'Hap and Leonard' towards the end of the summer in Louisiana, in and around Baton Rouge. If anyone's been to Louisiana or comes from Louisiana, they know what the weather's like down there at that time of year: it's unbearably hot for an Englishman.

Decide very early on: do you want to be an actor or do you want to be famous? Because they're very different routes.

Dieting isn't complicated: if you eat 2,000 calories, you have to burn it off; simple as that.

Somerset is where I call home, and where I feel most myself.

There are only a few TV networks that really invest in production in the way that I think they should. HBO, obviously, is one of them.

We always have relationships in our lives with people we've fallen in love with, who come back into our lives, and we fall in love with them again and go, 'I shouldn't be doing this,' but you can't stop it.

I do know Joe Lansdale has the most extraordinary voice you've ever heard in your life in terms of an accent that, when I started doing it, they had to go, 'Whoa, we need less.' But that's how he talks.

If you read Grimm's fairy tales, they're absolutely terrifying.

Airport security is a particular bugbear. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, while I can see that averting terrorism is manifestly important, the measures taken seem, simultaneously, absurd.

Playing Mark Antony in 'Rome' will always be a favourite of mine because he was such an outrageously big and interesting character to play. Also, the fact that we were able, with that character, to find out and present the public with a biography of that man that had not been really seen before.