Jamie Sives Quotations

I didn't have any desire to be an actor until right before I did it.

The Danes don't take themselves seriously at all and look for the joke in everything. Us Scots are on the same line of latitude and have the same amount of light, which may be why we have a similar sense of humour.

I'm not going to be the next Colin Farrell or Orlando Bloom.

I was 18 and making 150 quid a week, which was a lot of money to me. Then there was a bad winter and I got paid off. Then my firm, JW Henderson of Bowling Green Street, Leith, went bust. If they hadn't folded, I'd probably still be scaffolding and loving it.

I worked in an insurance office for six years, and it was there that I just woke up one day and realised there was something massively lacking in my life, and a non-contributory pension and a subsidised canteen could not fill it.

I secretly liked acting, but I wanted to play football. It was an enormous dream.

I was a big Mickey Rourke fan in his first incarnation. I thought that at the time he was America's greatest screen actor.

Acting is rare. You can be rehearsing Ibsen with Sir Richard Eyre and suddenly he has to take a call on his mobile telling him his friend Arthur Miller has died. Or you can come back from a job on the Isle of Man to be told by your agent you're going straight out to South Africa on another shoot. There's not even any time to wash your pants.

I came into acting with that sort of dull, meet-with-triumph-and-disaster-the-same philosophy and it's been the right one for me.

To be honest, I find most politicians very untrustworthy. When I listen to them talking - or rather, lying - I just feel there are very few politicians with integrity, so I never know who to bat for.