Peter Capaldi

If you put me in a real Tardis, I dread to think what would happen to the universe.

My adolescence was a kind of motorway pile-up. I wish I had known that one day the geek would inherit the Earth.

Of course I've had my moments of wanting to go back to Scotland, and I almost did a couple of times, but other things just came up.

I've lost count of the times I've been asked to 'be' Malcolm Tucker: to go on a political program on television, presumably in order to be the character and give opinions as him.

Nowadays, kids... young actors... they go straight to L.A. before they've even done anything.

When I was a kid, I wrote to the BBC, and the producers sent me a huge package through the post with 'Doctor Who' scripts. I'd never even seen a script and couldn't believe that they actually wrote this stuff down. It sort of opened a door.

I went to art school in the days when it was what you did if you didn't want to be like everybody else. You wanted to be strange and different, and art school encouraged that. We hated the drama students - they were guys with pipes and cardigans.

I've been really terrible in a lot of things because I learned by making mistakes. That makes you a different kind of actor, because you have to figure out for yourself what you do.

It seems to me that most things that are being made are designed for young people. There aren't that many depictions of melancholic older people, even though they form a growing proportion of the population.

I don't mind being stereotyped as angry - it's good to have a job.

I never really think of acting and directing as being separate; they are just different expressions of the same thing.

I don't want to find myself at the age of 60 waiting by the telephone for someone else to decide if I am capable of being in what might be a crummy TV production.