I'd Like To Think That We Strive

My Dad Was Working Abroad, In Iraq, And He Was A Doctor. We Used To Go And Visit Him, In Baghdad, Off And On. For The First Ten Years Of My Life, We Used To Go Backwards And Forwards To Baghdad, So That Was Quite Amazing. I Spent A Lot Of Time Traveling Around The Middle East.

My First Job When I Got My Equity Card Was Acting In 14 Plays Back-to-back. Playing That Many Roles, You Look For Ways Of Differentiating The Characters Physically, Which Goes Hand In Hand With Understanding Them Psychologically.

The Matter Is - We Are Actors Playing Roles [in Planet Apes] And They Happen To Be In This Instance Apes But There's No Difference. In The Scenes That We're Playing, If We Were To Block Out The Scenes As Actors In Costumes, It Would Be No Different.

When You Come Out Of The Other End Of A Long Process, Working With A Character [you Realize] This Character Has Really Shaped My Ideas.

I Never Felt Totally, 100%, Patriotically English... I'd Seen A Lot Of The World By An Early Age - Sort Of Spent A Lot Of Time Traveling Around Lebanon And I'd Seen Babylon, And Damascus, And All Sorts Of Places In The Middle East By The Time I Was Ten. Then We'd Return To Ruslip In West London... Done A Fair Bit Of Traveling Really.