Rory Kinnear

I used to go to Sheen High Street with my dad on a Saturday, and there was a butcher next door to the fishmonger. I hated the smell of the fishmonger, but I found the smell of the butcher's much more appealing. And I liked the big knives. I thought it looked like a decent job.

When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad's old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't become an actor. If perhaps I'd stayed on at university and become an academic.

I think having a dispassionate eye is a good way of making art. When you don't know the structures of a place, you are unencumbered.

Drama aids self-discovery like nothing else. In removing it from our schools, we remove the inestimable benefits of it from our society. No amount of studying oxbow lakes was ever going to help me emotionally through the death of my father.

Having gone to a public school, I thought I knew about posh people. But I didn't know anything until I went to Oxford.

Without being overtly political about it, if people with severe disabilities are calculated in societal terms purely as a monetised unit, in terms of how much they cost in terms of care, you lose an important sense of who they are and the effect they have.

I sort of understand why there is a brotherhood of Hamlets. It's a nice part of acting; you do get to be part of gangs.

There are a lot of actors out there who are able to engage with something in themselves which isn't necessarily their brain. But personally I find it very intellectually satisfying: doing your research and then burrowing as deeply into character as you can. I'm a naturally inquisitive person, too, and acting does feed into that.

I'm not that bothered about press nights as an actor or, particularly, by what people say about me, because I see myself as a reasonably small cog.

If you look at a painting that you love by one of the great masters, every time you go back to it, you see something different - a different attitude or brushstroke. 'Hamlet' is like an entire gallery of old masters.

I love music, and I once thought about doing a choral scholarship, but the people put me off.