Stephen Mangan Quotes

When you've lost a loved one, you realise how grateful you are for any help in those moments, and any scheme that tries to help families during that terrible time gets my backing.

I am a passionate believer that comedy is a way of tackling some of the most dark and difficult aspects of being a human being.

I'm a massive sucker for music documentaries.

I can watch anything from 1970s West Coast rock to 1990s electro-funk - I don't care.

Theatre's a much less faddish, more sensible world than TV or film.

I learnt a lot about how to negotiate the camera: everyone had told me an actor doesn't really need to do anything on screen, but I realised that wasn't true. If you do nothing, it's boring.

My childhood was very gregarious, and I was usually surrounded by close family.

If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a moody folk singer, sitting on stools and being very depressing.

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.

Dad was a strict disciplinarian and would give us a wallop with a wooden spoon if we were out of order. But we really respected him - he didn't try to be our best friend.

I don't like to watch myself on screen because in my mind there is a touch of George Clooney about me, but when I see it, there is more than a little Donkey from 'Shrek' about me.

I had an inspirational teacher at my junior school: Peter Nixon. He was enthusiastic, knowledgeable and slightly scary - a good combination for a teacher.

I thought the best route to being the great actor I wanted to be was to play the great classical parts.

I enter myself in races. I did a triathlon, and I have done a marathon a couple of times.

My mother was gentle and warm. She was the sort of person you could really open up to. I was the eldest and her only boy, so I guess I was treated differently. She did bring me up as a Catholic, and at one time I was an altar boy, but I lost my faith, as did my father, when my mother died at 45.

There's always an anxiety about playing literary characters because one of the great joys of reading books is that you can create your own vision of things.