A biography for Adrian Lesterhasn’t been written yet.
“I had a taste of the Hollywood experience doing 'Primary Colors.' Constant sunshine, your own chauffeur, drop-top BMW, the life of a 'major motion-picture star.' Then I came home and did no paid work for a year.”
“I was in a show called 'Undercover,' which did one season for the BBC. It was really well written and it was brilliant to be on screen with Sophie Okonedo - I've always wanted a second season of that.”
“I can't travel without my Sony noise-cancelling, in-ear headphones, my Bluetooth speaker and at least one baseball hat.”
“I've always been a city boy and it's why I love the Big Apple so much.”
“The plays that survive the most easily are the ones in which Shakespeare has dug deep into the psychology of people in extreme situations.”
“At heart, I'm analogue. I'm one of those people who has to buy something if they walk past a stationery shop.”
“Try to sleep as much as you can to look fresh after a flight.”
“I'm great at children's parties! Card tricks, cons, the lingo, the whole misdirection thing.”
“The arts safeguard our culture.”
“If your endgame as an actor is that you want as many people as possible to look at you then that's fine, go do your thing. But we have a greater role - every musician, dancer, singer and actor - and that is to hold a mirror up to society.”
“I was never very cool at school. To be cool, you had to listen to the music everyone else listened to, dress and wear your hair the same. The acceptance of difference was very narrow.”
“In 2007 I took a two-year break from shooting the BBC series 'Hustle,' in which I played a big-time con artist. I'd been making the series for four years and I was afraid of being typecast. For a change I got involved in a series called 'Bonekickers,' about a team of archaeologists.”
“There's something that happens whenever I see a brilliant show, where I just want to get up on stage.”
“Everything I love about television is encapsulated in how I used to feel watching 'The Sweeney,' 'Starsky & Hutch' and 'Doctor Who' when I was 10.”
“I was a fan of sci-fi shows, such as 'Space: 1999,' 'Blake's 7' and 'UFO.'”
“There was a moment at my wedding in 1997 when I got the bumps from all my male friends. We were in the garden and they grabbed me and threw me up and down in the air. It was a fantastic moment of complete irreverence.”
“My family's goal, really, was to make sure you worked hard and got paid for the job you were doing and that you could keep the job going and keep the money coming in.”
“Shakespeare put characters in extreme circumstances, all over his plays. Therefore their behaviour becomes extreme, in ways that can be both extremely good and extremely bad.”
“If you're in front of an audience and your voice, your mannerism, your pattern of speech, your intellectual approach to the performance tells the audience that you're acting, they will switch off.”
“Sunday lunch was a big thing for me as a child with all the family coming together. The kids would all eat first and then break out and go and make noise, leaving the adults to eat and talk in peace.”