Quotes from Tom Ellis

You're always asking yourself, are you doing the best for your child? And other parents let you know if you're not, just not in a direct way. There's a sense of competition, which is ridiculous because you know deep down you're all suffering.

The thing about Lucifer is that by the end of the first season, his world is falling apart a bit. Anyone that he could call an ally or trust, he now can't, and that leaves him in a place that he's never been before.

I grew up on the very human side of Christianity, so messages in the household I grew up in were about peace, love, and being understanding of everybody, which I think is quite cool.

My eldest daughter's been to a few sets of mine and gets spoiled when she's doing her nails, her hair. Though more often than not, you bring them to set, and they realize the filming process is pretty boring.

I come from a religious family - my father is a pastor, my uncle, my sister and her husband are a pastor team.

I've been acting for 15 years now, and the more you do, the more confidence you get about 'this is my career, and this is what I'm going to be doing.' Since I've started coming to the States, I've had a really great response. It's given me a lot of confidence to be more judicious about my own choices.

This is going to sound so boring, but I play golf in Hertfordshire at a club called Sandy Lodge just by Moor Park Tube station. It's where I unwind and don't think about anything else.

One of the biggest heroes and influences of mine, especially acting and working in comedy, is Steve Coogan.

There's something really charming about a character that is fundamentally flawed and does some pretty despicable things, but yet you still kind of love him.

I couldn't afford to go to drama school in London. Then I met with the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, and I fell in love with the city. It was one of the few schools that offered me a place. It didn't do me any harm.

The nice thing about 'Miranda' especially is that the audience that we had was school kids right through to pensioners. It seems to be a show that people watch as a family, so it was the first job I've been involved in that certainly my oldest daughter and my middle daughter are big fans of, and proud that I'm in it, which is a nice feeling.

I'm in the Apple store on Regent Street far too much; I'm obsessed by whatever the latest Apple gadget is. For clothes, I love to shop in Liam Gallagher's shop Pretty Green on Carnaby Street, or Cult Clothing in Crouch End, for Original Penguin and G-Star.

You meet Rush at a certain point in his life where he's made a decision that he's going to not live by the moral code of being a doctor. He's decided to disengage with that side of his life for various reasons, which we find out through the first season.

What I really wanted to do was take this character and go beneath the veneer of Lucifer. Underneath it all, there was a guy who was a hurt soul and rejected from his father. How that played upon his choices was kind of interesting, but also it's going inside a shell of someone who doesn't know what an emotion is.

Lucifer likes to have fun, but we need to make sure that he's also rooted in a proper journey. For the first few episodes after a pilot, you're just trying to establish your world and the starting points for your characters. But I feel like, as the stakes went up, the 'Lucifer' veneer got less and less.

I wanted to work on a cable show and with a writer/director because that's a much more fulfilling and freeing experience, as an actor.

Trying to find a human side to the character is a way to give them a chance to have people like them.

I've been acting for many years, and the more you do, the more confidence you get about "this is my career and this is what I'm going to be doing."

During the pilot, director Len Wiseman and I discussed how Lucifer views humanity, and we can came up with this notion that he sees them as lab rats.

A lot of actors would tell you that they'd rather play the villain than the hero. When you're the character, there are no repercussions. So there is a kind of liberating feeling about saying certain things to certain people - and I think that it's always quite satisfying to do that.

I think I've started to dream in American a little bit.

Being on the floor of a TV show is sometimes a quite frustrating experience.