James Nesbitt Quotes

You can get a bit world-weary in this job, and 'The Passion' reminded me of what a fantastic job acting is and how lucky I am to be doing it. Acting is something you didn't do in Ireland. It's easy to get carried away with yourself. Although surgeons know how to deal with bits of the brain, they don't really know how it works. If you are a Northern Irish actor, maybe subconsciously more than consciously, you do have an instinctive responsibility at some point to tackle the recent history of where we have come from. It's not only a responsibility, but a privilege. Perhaps our imagination needs crime stories to fulfill some craving we have, as a way to assuage a darkness in ourselves. I want to beat up Michael Fassbender in a movie. I was with him at the beginning of his career when he did an episode of 'Murphy's Law.' He's a proper superstar and enormously talented, but I want to do a scene where I properly duff him up. I think teaching should be a vocation, and they should be paid more for it. My agent Sue realised after 'Cold Feet' that I could have spent the rest of my life doing similar roles. So she was instrumental in moving me away from that. The reality of life in Northern Ireland is that if you were Protestant, you learned British history, and if you were Catholic, you learned Irish history in school. I'm Ulster Presbyterian. We understand the need to work hard from an early age. Who am I to pass judgment? Judgment has been passed on me, but I adhere to, 'Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.' Tumours can come out of nowhere. I'm an actor, learning lines and saying them in the right order. I am in the public eye, and I accept that my actions may be open to question. We have to get behind the scientists and push for a dementia breakthrough. It could be that we fear dementia out of a sense of hopelessness, but there is hope, and it rests in the hands of our scientists. Acting was a godsend. I found myself because I loved acting. I went to India with UNICEF in connection with Manchester United to raise money for children's education. I actually started out on the stage as a singer. When you're brought up in a Unionist culture, you can't help but feel Unionist. People don't watch TV only to relate to stuff. They also watch to find out about a world they can't relate to. The whole process of making 'Bloody Sunday' was difficult but extraordinary. Supporting drama for young people is close to my heart. Brain surgeons are dealing with the very last thread of life, and they have to be very confident, but I think they tend to remember their failures rather than their successes, and that must be very hard. Who do you share that failure with? That's why their personal lives are often disastrous. When you see a tumour in the brain, it's an ugly looking thing. It's kind of black, grisly and messy. Or it can be white. To see it taken away is just amazing. My preference is for good writing. It doesn't matter if it's for film or TV. Whatever. It starts with the writing. Even though I've had problems with writers, it doesn't matter how great of an actor you are. If the writing is bad, you're going to struggle. What I discovered all over Ireland is that people living simple lives by the sea or in the remote countryside seem a lot calmer than city folk with their iPads and their Android phones. A lot of people of my Ulster Protestant background would have been very suspicious of the notion of a film about Bloody Sunday. Our fear would have been that it would be terribly anti-Britain and anti-soldiers: a piece of nationalist propaganda. Northern Ireland has treated me well, you know? I've never felt that acting was my vocation - never had that tortured thing. I love acting, but it doesn't feed my soul.