When I am playing a role far away from me with an accent that is not mine I always employ a dialect coach. I am almost always playing someone that has an accent that is not mine.

I was sometimes called 'coconut' when I was at school.

One of the things I have an allergic reaction to playing, especially as a black actor, is the mandatory kind of best friend/cop/detective type. You will never see me in that movie.

You can’t have people curating culture in this way when we need to see things in order to reform from them.

If you merely focus on what we already know, then it's not revelatory. You may as well just go and watch a documentary or a few videos on Youtube, and you're good.

I don't have a tailor, but I do love clothes.

Excellence is the best weapon against prejudice.

Find the audience, be excellent, and you will be fine.

I truly believe that one of the things that has been lacking in the USA is a spirit of repentance about the injustices of slavery and the injustices of segregation and racism generally.

We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.

Considering that I'm British and I talk the way I do, I love it when a director takes a chance on me.

Man must use what he has, not hope for what is not.

To be brave, you have to fight against something that scares you. That's the rule.

... we see the poor as a mass of shadow, painted in one flat grey wash, at the remote edges of our sunshine.

Except physically, we know little more about Garbo than we know about Shakespeare.

I've been half-frozen for so long, it is as though the winter has set up home in my marrow.

Be not the first to take up the new, nor the last to cast the old aside.

The companies I have traditionally seen do best over the long term had lead investors for their seed rounds

I do not believe there has ever been a name as important as Pierre Cardin in the general history of couture.

Know mankind well, don't degrade every man as evil, and don't exalt every man thinking he is good. He who cannot discover himself; cannot discover the world.

Will Rogers was an American hero - someone you could get your teeth into and love.