Paul Bettany

“Yeah, I love history and I loved it as a kid.”

“I still read the British papers, but I've never been a Royalist, ever. It's funny, there always seems to be much more of a fascination with the Royal Family over here then there does in England.”

“I loved working with Peter Weir. I think he's one of the greats and will be remembered as one of the greats.”

“I was brought up Catholic. I'm lapsed. From the age of three I was with the nuns. Now I'm an atheist.”

“You can fudge a lot as an actor, but you can't fudge being a parent.”

“You can end up living your life pretty incrementally, and that's boring.”

“I'm never late, and I love that. Because when you've got three kids and a life to be living, and somebody's half an hour late to set, you start to get a little bit like, 'Come on. Come on, let's get this done.'”

“The only thing I think I can be accused of about paparazzi is being really naive. I didn't think about it coming along with the job and I never, during my three years at drama school, fantasized about one bit of it.”

“My relationship with 'Star Wars' is that I'm old enough that I saw it when it first came out - 'A New Hope,' that is - and it was like when Dorothy steps out of black and white into Technicolor. I was transported from a gray, miserable 1970s London into a different galaxy, and I didn't know what it was, but I wanted to be a part of it.”

“So the actual privilege is that you can then take time off - and if you don't, you're a fool. You're earning all this money to support children whom you then don't see, which is absurd.”

“I think when you're trying to produce a relationship on screen that doesn't actually exist, perhaps sometimes there's a temptation to look at each other more, to touch each other more.”

“I feel safe in saying this, and that is that Peter Weir is without a doubt one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. I'd open a door in a movie for him if he asked me to.”

“Trying to be a good actor has to be involved with placing yourself imaginatively in different people's circumstances.”

“The difficulty of looking at a system like natural selection if you have any sort of moral sense yourself, is almost what makes it beautiful.”

“The trouble with talking about acting is that it's like sex. It's enormously fun to do but just dreadfully embarrassing when you have to talk about it.”

“No one I know works in the industry. No, that's not true - Liv Tyler.”

“Paul is an awful name. I might as well be Bob.”

“Actors can be many things - vain, venal, self-serving, obnoxious, bullies - but all of the good ones are great storytellers.”

“There are lots of people that make movies. It's not just the director.”

“I don't enjoy watching action films, but I loved films like 'Rust and Bone' and 'The Beat That My Heart Skipped.'”