Paterson Joseph

“As an actor you try to find reasons for actions taken by your character, which is what I did with Kamal, so he is not just a two-dimensional villainous character. Starting with his name, Hadley - this is such an English sounding name, I figured there must have been a white man who was part of his family line.”

“For casting purposes, it seems I was born in the wrong skin.”

“I couldn't be happier to have found a home at Dialogue Books for my debut novel 'The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho.'”

“One of the excuses used for not casting culturally different actors is authenticity. But theater is not documentary.”

“Black women's hair is a complicated and skillful thing that you need to know in order to tackle it and make it look great.”

“I don't have anything against someone going to the biggest market in the world for the job that we do. What I don't want there to be is talent drain, particularly among excellent black practitioners, because other, younger practitioners have no one to look to.”

“Welcome to Britain in 2020. When we march for Black Lives Matters here, the next day the far-right marches.”

“The black presence in our British history has sometimes wilfully, sometimes neglectfully, been whitewashed out of our national tale.”

“I did Shakespeare with teenagers in Harlesden, and it transformed them. I did it with prisoners in Brixton and it inspired them to write sonnets about love, loss, time. The guy is... magical.”

“Racism is a strange mental illness where you look at somebody and say, 'I hate you because of the colour of your skin.'”

“Poor Marlowe gets a rough deal for simply not being Shakespeare. But he was Bill's forerunner. It's hard to imagine one without the other.”

“We have to have more voices, more varied voices from people from all sorts of backgrounds.”

“There's a desire now to have multi-ethnic casts in many, many things, even in costume drama, which I'm very, very pleased about.”

“To be remembered by name for a character, with a sort of guilty joy, is... aw man, it's marvellous.”

“That's the mentality of the soldier. You act on order, not on your own cognition.”

“Just because somebody is a racist, it doesn't mean they are not human. It just means that they perhaps have had a certain upbringing, or have had things reinforced, that have made them ignorant of 'the other.'”

“You can transform somebody just by telling them, 'I'm listening.'”

“This is the story that I've grown up with in this country, Black protest is always seen as violent. In fact, Black celebration is always seen as potentially violent. Our Notting Hill carnival, which is the biggest street carnival in the world, is always seen beforehand as some sort of fearful thing where it's all going to be crime and nothing else.”

“About two months after I'd finished filming 'The Beach' in Thailand, I found myself on a roof in Croydon at 2:00 A.M. in the rain with one spotlight on me, a student director and her technician trying to film me as an angel who'd fallen from the sky. Then the lights went out. And I thought, 'Yeah, you're back.'”

“I'm not a gambler. And I don't approve of gambling unless it's for the Grand National.”