You want people to identify with the person on the screen or in the theater, but you don't want them to identify with you as a person.

There's no quicker way to sound like a wanker than being an actor talking about his work, but I think it is a job. You do go to work to do it. It's not like you're so marvelously gifted it just spills out of you.

You know, you just go [to Hollywood] to do your job, and then you find yourself in this however many million-dollar movie, and that's a big machine, but you're still there to do the same job. I'll know more about it once the publicity machine kicks in, because I've never been through all that madness. Which I'm looking forward to, but I'm also apprehensive. I watch chat-shows here, and you see British actors flogging their films, and doing it very well, and I'm just thinking I hope I don't say 'fuck' in the middle of Letterman.

You never have any control over what people write or what they think, but there is a sense of me as a working-class lad done very well. I don't know where that comes from . . . It's partly to do with One Summer (1983), the first thing I ever did, which is a very gritty piece of work; it was quite romantic, but it was about two poverty-stricken inner-city kids. People get confused, and think that was my background as well. In people's minds, there's no such thing as a middle-class scouser. Liverpool does tend to carry that sort of stamp of tough city kids, no arse in your trousers . . . it's so not that. We're the European city of culture, for God's sake!