I'm frustrated with Hollywood and television and the movies because they see science fiction as an excuse for eye candy, for lots of great special effects.
I've got one outlet now - music - and it's great to be able to sign someone that excites me. I'd like to also be able to do that with the scripts I get or books or TV shows... I'm not going to limit myself.
When women get great roles in life, they start to get great roles in films and TV. Look at Janet Reno, Madeleine Albright, and Mrs. Thatcher. Because those images are coming at us in life, they are reflected in acting.
If you had told me in the Seventies and Eighties that TV would be as edgy or edgier than most films, and more intelligently written than most films, I wouldn't have believed it. There's great stuff out there.
My television and movie career has also taken me all over the world. I've had great times in the Far East, Russia, South America and Sweden - where I met my wife of 55 years, Maj.
I'm interested not just in projects that I'll be starring in, but producing film and TV that's really quality and great for adults; and when I say 'great for adults,' it doesn't mean without humor, because I'm also interested in doing comedy.
Everyone saw me on TV or read articles, and it was all about my great marriage, the white picket fence, all this success and my perfect life. But behind the scenes, it was a struggle.
It's so great in Hollywood now. You have people past 40 sitting and talking about serious stuff, writing and making movies and TV, but there's laser pistols and superheroes and alien monsters involved. It's viable and mainstream.
TV and film were always governing passions of mine, and that first wave of great HBO shows in the early years of the millennium was feeding my desire for fiction more than the books I was reading.
I was opposed to doing TV for a long time because I thought the quality of writing wasn't very strong, as opposed to film, but there's been a shift in term of the quality of scripts. HBO has attracted a tremendous amount of great writing talent.
We were a Western civilisation, an English speaking civilisation, both NZ and Australia, and we had all these influences coming from both Great Britain and America to us; sending us their culture in the shape and form of movies and television.
America's popular heroes have seldom been its great thinkers, and even less its scientists. The success of TV's 'Big Bang Theory,' which seems to give the lie to this claim, is more the exception that proves the rule.
Reality television hasn't killed documentaries, because there are so many great documentaries still being made, but it certainly has changed the landscape. There is this breed of gimmicky documentary that is basically a reality show.
People know the facts of a story just as well as the people on TV do, and they have more platforms to hold the media accountable when they don't get it right. We are a world full of media experts. That's a great thing.
I know what it takes to go from the point where someone's looking at a newspaper article, and thinking, 'Oh, this would make a great TV series,' to the point where you're actually on a set and there's a camera aimed at someone.
I mean, I'm pretty good in real life, but sometimes people seem surprised that I'm like a normal teenager and wear black nail polish and I'm just a little bit more edgy than the person I play on television.
What does good in bed mean to me? When I'm sick and I stay home from school propped up with lots of pillows watching TV and my mom brings me soup - that's good in bed.
I left Britain in the mid-1990s when TV was going down the cundy - another good Dundee word - because I wanted a film career. But as I get older, I find myself being drawn back to my roots, and I'm loving it.
I don't like watching television too much; it tires me out for some reason. But I saw a fair bit of 'Game of Thrones' because it was so good. I mostly watched episodes that I wasn't in.
The Times' new credibility committee report that was issued on Monday very specifically said they will be putting in a policy that reporters must get permission from their department heads to appear on television, which I think is a really good thing...
People have asked me why are Australians and Brits so good at American accents, and it's quite simple. We grew up listening to the American sound on our TV. That's why American actors have a hard time with foreign accents.
