I have no desire to play King Lear or Hamlet. I never had a grand ambition. I just followed my nose.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I'm not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.
I always ended up having the funny part in Shakespeare, but I really thought I'd be doing theater. That was my ambition for myself.
I've never really had a desire to do Shakespeare. For me, it's just too many lines.
When you're playing King Lear, you have to have a little humour, or you will have no tragedy when the king dies.
I never wanted to do Shakespeare; I never liked watching it, it's always frightened me, and I've never been any good at it. But I really wanted to work with the director Tim Carroll and Mark Rylance.
'King Lear,' I've been seeing all my life. I mean, the great actors of my lifetime... to join their company, as it were, by playing a part that's challenged them, is one of the great joys of being an actor who does the classics.
I'm just an entertainer. All I want to be is funny. I never aspired to play Hamlet.
I want to play King Lear, Macbeth, Benedict, Coriolanus. I wouldn't mind doing Hamlet again. Well, I'm a little old. Perhaps I can rub Vaseline on the audience's eyes.
I had always wanted to retell a Shakespeare play. It was an ambition from college days. But in order to be able to do it... the circumstances in my life didn't come together for a long time.
I not only loved studying theater, I loved being a theater major. It gave me an excuse to brood, to grow a beard, to wear black 'at' people. I didn't just want to play Hamlet, I wanted to be Hamlet.