James Nesbitt

“There will only ever be 13 dwarves in 'The Hobbit' - and I was one of them. If I had my time again, would I do it? Yeah, I would.”

“My wife would say I'm more Hyde than Jekyll!”

“I was one of the many kids in Northern Ireland who grew up in the countryside and had an idyllic childhood well away from the Troubles.”

“Improvising political dialogue is not easy.”

“There's some irony in playing a journalist after some of the stuff that has been written about me, but it's a great profession, particularly investigative journalism.”

“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.”

“I thought I was God's gift to mankind and the greatest Irishman since George Best.”

“My best friends are still the ones I first attached myself to when I went to school because, all of a sudden, I was leaving the rather pampered and occasionally very annoying world of having...”

“I'm no pin-up.”

“I'm Ulster Presbyterian. We understand the need to work hard from an early age.”

“I get an awful lot of people coming up and saying they went to school with me. There must have been 80,000 pupils at that school!”

“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...”

“Richard Armitage is very good at the old horse riding because of course he did it in 'Robin Hood,' so he's very good at that.”

“I'm not strong-willed enough or unkind enough... or maybe simply not wise enough to tell a journalist that a subject is out of bounds.”

“I do commercials, but I also go to Sudan as an ambassador for UNICEF.”

“I went to India with UNICEF in connection with Manchester United to raise money for children's education.”

“Unification is less important than the fact Ireland is now conflict-free.”

“When you're brought up in a Unionist culture, you can't help but feel Unionist.”