“I want to keep audiences off balance, so they don’t know who I am or how to take me. If I duck and weave, as Frank Bruno might say, I’ll have a longer shelf life.”

“The thought of being in Harry Potter makes me physically ill. On the other hand, my kids might turn around in a few years and ask, ‘Why weren’t you in Harry Potter’?”

“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.”

“The way a person moves tells you a lot about them. Look at the way I’m holding this coffee mug. If I were to thump it down on the table, I wouldn’t be respecting your tape recorder. If I move it gently, it means I am showing some respect. These are the things I bring to my performances.”

“To be honest I’ve worked with a few American actors now and I was looking forward to that you know, coming up in my career thinking “Yeah I’d like to work with some Americans because they seem to be very, very comfortable with improvisation. But that has not been my experience at all. They have to have things absolutely set.”

“I must have been dreaming about Albie. I spoke in a Liverpool accent all the time. It becomes second nature. It’s much easier like that. It seems to me common sense rather than extraordinary.”

“I feel with TV you’re allowed more freedom. With television there’s more time to create something through the episodes. The fact that you’re working harder on the surface seems more difficult, but you get into a way of working where if you’re not allowed to stop and breathe and think about it, you just go on instinctively, which is the way I prefer anyway. It becomes a more spontaneous thing.”

“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.”

“I’ll spare you the actors’ pretentious rubbish, but a face reflects experience, so if you concentrate on a character something happens to you physically. Many actors look at the costume before the part, and that seems crazy to me. It’s much more fun to be ugly. Not that I think I’m ugly, but I’ve never considered myself good-looking.”

“A lot of the characters I play come from the working-class. It’s a background I’m familiar with. It’s not about being hard. It’s just knowing how that society works and what the rules are. I grew up in a working-class area of Glasgow and that experience has stood me in good stead.”

“I’m in four different films this year, and I have four different accents. I sound different in every film. You have to love a character to play it well, and change in my work is what I want.”

“I must have done something right because they gave me a grant to the Royal Scottish Academy Of Music And Drama in 1983. But I hated all that stuff they taught me while thumping out the rawness and energy I had. I went off and formed a small experimental, often political, theatre company called Rain Dog to unlearn it.”

“The script will point you in certain directions and I go the opposite if I can. I try do do one thing and tell a different story with my eyes. I believe what’s more interesting is always what’s not being said.”

“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.”

“The darker the character, the more interesting.”

“It depends who the director is you know, I mean Ken Loach for instance. I’ve done up to 32 takes with him.”

“Many actors look at the costume before the part, and that seems crazy to me. It’s much more fun to be ugly. Not that I think I’m ugly, but I’ve never considered myself good-looking.”

“I don’t consider the consequences of what I do as far as my career is concerned. That’s not my job. Some actors do consider that. But I don’t want to build a whole career on how I think people will perceive my every move.”

“If you look at a painting and you get moved by that painting, then it’s an amazing thing the artist has done. And without surfing into the land of wank, if you can move people then it is an amazing gift – something to be held onto and treated seriously. If you recognize that , you get self- fulfillment in a different way from being a star. For me it’s been more of an exploration of myself.”

“You never stop learning in this business and when you do you should fucking chuck it in. You’ve just got to try and get better.”

“You make one movie that goes off the scale and there’s all this pressure to move on. You’re pushed and pulled in all conceivable directions, but at the end of the day the only thing that can happen is you split in two, which is precisely why I’m retaining control of all my own decisions. I keep my own counsel.”

“What I do is ridiculous. It’s fantasy land. It’s nonsense. If you realize that, then acting is much simpler than it’s made out. Success? Yeah, but not at any price – and certainly not at the cost of my own personal, private life. Fame just isn’t me. It’s not what I’m interested in. It’s not a priority.”

“I went to a film festival in Italy a couple of years ago and they called me “the reluctant actor”. There’s maybe an element of truth there.”

“It’s not that I rail against it, but I don’t feel entirely comfortable with it – fame, if that’s what it’s called.”

“For me, it’s a voyage of self-discovery. I’m able to go on a set and to explore situations, personalities, people and characters that are close to me, or maybe not. Through going there and experiencing these different people and their situations, it helps me to get oriented and develop as a human being. So, acting is fundamental to who I am.”

“It’s beneficial to me to find a piece that has social worth. At its most coarse level acting is a frivolous thing to do. It feeds my own head to do something that says something to someone.”

“I hate the word celebrity. I hate it if it’s attached to me in any way. I’m not a raconteur. I’m not an entertainer. If you put yourself in that position, it trivializes what you do. And if you don’t take yourself seriously, then nobody else is going to.”

“Family? That’s my stuff and no one else’s.”

“Family is the most important thing in my life. I enjoy my work but I need to be able to go home at night.”

“There’s this guy called Robert Carlyle and there’s guy called Bobby. Basically, the guy called Robert Carlyle works for me.”

From Movies
“Bit of this, bit of that, bit of the other.”

/The Full Monty

“Nathan’s yours an’ he’s mine, an’ he’s fuck all to do with ‘im.”

/The Full Monty

“I’m in this chair, but it’s you that cannae move.”

/Go Now

“I cannae take this Isobel. It’s living a lie. I’ve had enough.”

/Hamish MacBeth

“Surrender’s for wankers!”

/Plunkett & Macleane

“That was reeeally sneaky.”

/Ravenous

“Hug my rod!”

/Safe

“Depression is for the middle classes, the rest of us have an early start in the morning.”

/Riff Raff

“All right, nobody move. The lassie got glassed and no cunt leaves here until we find out which cunt did it.”

/Trainspotting

“It was fuckin’ obvious that cunt was gonna fuck some cunt!”

/Trainspotting

“Poor I may be, unlucky I may be, but I am NOT useless!”

/Angela’s Ashes