Quotes from Robert Carlyle

I often have scripts sent to me with allegedly Scottish characters where I end up telling them, 'You're going to have to rethink this whole thing!'

Each performance and each film is what it is. It's right and belongs within that moment. You look at it and try to make it fit your particular part of your character and your particular film.

Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I am a very patriotic guy, in terms of my Scottishness and my roots.

Anyone that knows me knows what I'm about, and I'm very much a British actor, a European actor.

Every actor I think has got their own number of takes that they like, you know. Some actors like to go all day, you know on the one scene and some actors want to take two takes. I personally like four.

A lot of Scots have settled in Canada over the years and it's a very easy place for Scots - they understand us, we understand them.

I feel like I'm the luckiest man on the planet.

I'm not someone who believes in wasting my vote.

I was 16 when I was in a band, for about 10 minutes. I went off and did acting after that. So it was a wee moment for me when I sang.

We met in Cracker. I played a maniac fan who murders a policeman and she did my makeup. I thought anyone interested in me looking like that must have genuinely liked me.

To pursue a career in Hollywood you have to have a personality bypass. Look at the top 20 stars in the world - there's probably only two actors among them. Hollywood's not about you as an actor. It's about your currency, what you 'bring to the table'. And I've never been one to jump through hoops for anyone.

I'd work with Danny Boyle every day of the week. No matter what he was doing I would do that.

Biologically, I'm lucky - an angular face and dark colouring which shows up well on camera.

The darker the character, the more interesting.

The U.K. and the U.S. are very different countries, and it really shows in the television.

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

In troubled times the last thing you want to do is to stick your money into a film. It's such a gamble.

Acting, the arts in general, is a magnet for the wounded of society.

I've always taken my love of children from my father. He was a children magnet. Suddenly, having my first child hit home what my dad went through.

Acting is probably the greatest therapy in the world. You can get a lot stuff out of you on the set so you don't have to take it home with you at night. It's the stuff between the lines, the empty space between those lines which is interesting.

People go to the movies to watch a film and all they're thinking about is the actress's cellulite they saw in a magazine.

There are a lot of things that make up a performance, a lot of technical things. It isn't always just about pulling it up from the darkest recesses of your mind or your heart. It's your experience and your observation.

I don't take a great deal of interest in party politics. Social politics interests me a great deal more.

In the late '70s, maybe just before I started, there was still an attitude that if you did film you didn't do TV and vice versa, but that's gone now.