On having a backup plan: 'Always a good plan anytime you want to follow your dream - I love writing, acting, and psychiatry - there are crazy people everywhere which means I can take my career anywhere my dream needs to go.

The one thing I learned the most about acting is it takes a tremendous amount of courage to go there and stand still. It takes courage and guts to step out of your mind frame and depict something.

Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.

The drama's laws the drama's patrons give. For we that live to please must please to live.

[on Martin Freeman playing Bilbo Baggins] It was great. I got to hang out with him, and I kept a straight face for a bit and then I started giggling because I know Martin, I don't know Bilbo. For Martin to be sitting there playing Bilbo is amazing. He's going to be amazing, he's going to be fantastic in this film.

If you're trying to learn how to act from a class, you're analyzing the teachers' movements and their intricacies, and it becomes like a pantomime of you wanting to be them, and that's wrong. Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin. It's your own imagination, and your own version of it.

Filmmaking is a very complex form - ya know, acting, lighting, screenwriting, storytelling, music, editing - all these things have to come together.

Acting is not about being famous, it's about exploring the human soul.

As much as we Egyptians treasure our military, acting alone it cannot provide the legitimacy to lay the foundations for democracy.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.