JAMIE PARKER

J. K. Rowling has already got a whole generation reading.

I think it's harder to write about joy than pain, isn't it?

Trust is front and center in the working of this production, and it's conceivable there is a harder-working team of theater practitioners than the 'Cursed Child' company, but if there are, I'd like to meet them.

I've done a lot of shows over a long time, and I've lost my voice on plays before, and it's because I've been thinking closely about what I'm doing with my voice. Babies can scream all day and never lose their voice because they just mean it. As long as you mean it, then it carries you through. It's do it or don't.

I know I'm only as good as the material I've got to work with. I'm not an alchemist, not when it comes to writing or production.

Theatre is home - I grew up doing it - and that is never going to change.

I like Monoloco in Petersfield, Hampshire, and Little Dorrit in London's Borough Market. Everything's delicious, healthy, and inexpensive.

I will take to my grave with me the atmosphere of the first 'Cursed Child' preview, because no one knew anything. Only very rarely have I been able to deploy the phrase 'audible gasps.'

I'm making it up as I go along, like everyone else. There probably are some actors who are quite methodical or at least take their time about what particular footholds to find on the rocks next. There are always choices, even when you're not getting seen, for how to spend your time. It's only after 10 years that I got any kind of traction at all.

I think what I have to offer is more useful in theatre than on screen.

You can't go into parenthood as a battle wearing armour. It doesn't work that way.

For my money, all theatre should be free.

Wizarding is technical to me. When you get something that adds up to more than the sum of its parts, that feeling is magic to me. That's a kind of alchemy.

Normally, you spend the play convincing people of the world and the characters.

I think you need to be very careful of getting 'stuck' in musical theatre.

It's all you want as an actor: to have a story people want to be told.

When I got the job on 'Cursed Child,' I was doing another show in the West End, and I was playing a part that Marlon Brando had played.

I was twelve when I went to boarding school in Edinburgh.

In real life, I wish I could do a Scourgify. That would just be incredible helpful, when I know the rest of the family is gong to be back in 30 seconds and I haven't tidied up. That would be really helpful.

New York really does know how to welcome you through its gates - if they decide that's what they want to do.

If you are not getting people who have never been to the theatre before to come, then you are not doing your job.

You're always trying to find common ground with whatever you do, but you want to not be thinking about yourself when you're performing a play. The job is getting yourself out of the way and letting the character go about the scenes.

I miss the generation of actors such as John Mills, where it doesn't surprise you at all when he crops up in a film tap-dancing.

Isn't it a rare thing, telling hopeful stories now? I think we need more of that, to be honest.

It can be painful leaving parts of yourself behind. Change and shuffling off your previous skin is traumatic, but it can be done.