Quotes from Martin Freeman

There's a difference between the parts that I play and who I am and who people think I am. There's quite a big discrepancy sometimes between those things.

When people bully us, we are complicit in it in some way. We do allow it to happen to some extent.

I have a very extreme state of mind. Things are very black or very white.

I've always got my eye on my deathbed.

There are still things technically about films that I think are a mystery to me and I want to remain a mystery. I don't particularly want to know what everyone's job is because I've got lines to learn.

I don't like 'cool telly.'

I can live without endless television programmes and films just centered around computers. I can sort of live without that.

I like the idea of not everything happening between two human beings to be everyone's property.

I'm afraid I don't have a very pragmatic or unromantic view of props. I don't imbue them with any great sense of mystery or anything.

I wasn't like a Fifties dad.

I know very few people who have literally improvised a film from start to finish.

As soon as a job finishes, I am done with it. When I'm really, really enjoying the job, I love the job, I want it to end because it's supposed to.

You have to, in a way, just get your head down and do the work and not expect every day to bring riches and not expect every minute to bring wild excitement, 'cause it just doesn't. It doesn't on films, anyway.

Half of us are partly German! Half our language and culture, generally, in Anglo-Saxon terms, is German.

Comedy can't be about continuous success.

What makes Shakespeare eternal is his grasp of psychology. He knew how to nail stuff about us as human beings.

I have no opinion on 48 frames a second at all. I'd be completely unsuitable to talk about that.

You're not fully you until life has booted you in the behind.

I don't want to sound like a grumpy old man, but nothing winds me up more than people saying, 'Chill out' to me when I'm irritated!

You absorb 2,000 years of history just by being near the Thames.

I have less than no interest in trying to replicate another brilliant actor's work, thank you very much.

There was very little drama and performance at my school, so I've never forgotten the people who did encourage me and I've thought whether it would be a good idea to even get in touch with them and just say thanks, because they really opened a door for me mentally and emotionally - that's really important.

Acting is the only thing I'm even vaguely good at and acting is something that I think I do know about.

I think the only directing I'd be any good at is theatre directing. It's the only thing I can see myself doing.