Rory Kinnear quotes:

Drama aids self-discovery like nothing else. In removing it from our schools, we remove the inestimable benefits of it from our society. No amount of studying oxbow lakes was ever going to help me emotionally through the death of my father.

Both Othello and Iago seem a bit cracked. If you spend 15 years being responsible for death and destruction, that sense of suppressed horror is strong.

If you look at a painting that you love by one of the great masters, every time you go back to it, you see something different - a different attitude or brushstroke. 'Hamlet' is like an entire gallery of old masters.

However democratic and egalitarian we kid ourselves into thinking society might be, I think that sense of entitlement operates as basically and viciously as it always did.

When you're 15, you're not really talking about the vicissitudes of fate and failed love and poetry and swordfighting - not a lot is necessarily touching on your own personal experience.

Because my dad died when I was young, and I have a severely disabled sister, I couldn't really push the envelope at home.

When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad's old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.

Had my dad not been short and fat and balding, there's no doubt his career would have been very different. But he could do lots of stuff and made a very good career out of it. He had an incredible work ethic because he lost his father when he was very young, and the family had to pull together.

The nice thing about doing a weekly record is you're rehearsing all week and working on getting the script better. Come Friday, when it's time to actually film it, you feel like you've done most of the work!

The truth is that from the age of 14, I felt about 40, and for that reason, I felt that I would never succeed as an actor until my looks caught up with my actual age.

The more rarefied a life you live, the easier it is to think that those who don't share it could be demonised. To find the common humanity becomes more of a struggle the more you surround yourself with nice things.

I get antsy if a year goes by without doing a play. I don't go to the gym, so this is my way of trying to live longer.

Writing will remain a passion project.

I'd not really ever expected to play anything like 'Hamlet.' I hadn't seen myself as a natural Hamlet, whatever a natural Hamlet is, and I quickly realised there is no such thing.

For a while, I dallied with the idea of the law - I didn't really know what it was, but I thought it sounded sensible. And as a child, I wanted to be a goalkeeper. Or a butcher.

I think having a dispassionate eye is a good way of making art. When you don't know the structures of a place, you are unencumbered.

If you lose a parent, no matter at what age, every five or 10 years you have a different way of missing them and a different way of getting on with your life.

I'm not that bothered about press nights as an actor or, particularly, by what people say about me, because I see myself as a reasonably small cog.

There are a lot of actors out there who are able to engage with something in themselves which isn't necessarily their brain. But personally I find it very intellectually satisfying: doing your research and then burrowing as deeply into character as you can. I'm a naturally inquisitive person, too, and acting does feed into that.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't become an actor. If perhaps I'd stayed on at university and become an academic.

Without being overtly political about it, if people with severe disabilities are calculated in societal terms purely as a monetised unit, in terms of how much they cost in terms of care, you lose an important sense of who they are and the effect they have.

In some ways, I've been left with this great 'idolic' image of my father, but there's a sense of absence, too. You miss his advice and, also, his getting to know the person I have become.