Stephen Rea

When you're playing the part of a saxophone or a trumpet player, both of which I have done, it would be nice to be able to play like John Coltrane, but you can't. Your job is to do something else. And I'm not sure what it is, but I don't think I'd be acting Niels Bohr any better if I went and studied physics for five years.

I've been worked over by the English press because there's an assumption that my politics are identical with my wife's, and for that matter that my wife's politics are identical with her politics of 20 years ago.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.

I watch TV on my TV pretty exclusively. However, when I'm on that long flight between Los Angeles and New York, a great way to pass that time is to download movies on iTunes and watch them on my laptop.