Matthew Macfadyen Quotes

I don't know where I see myself next month let alone five years. My whole life is last minute. I enjoy the spontaneity of it; I like not knowing what I will do next or whether I will be in the country next week. I just enjoy being around a creative environment.

I think what my hope is is that the only downside of having a steady job on television is, I think for all actors, there's a piece, there's some adrenaline, and part of the love of the job is not knowing what's coming next, and the variety.

What I love about my work is the variety and not knowing what's coming next, and being able to embrace something for a period of time and know something new is going to follow.

Any actor has their moments of being stressed, but the great part about this job is that it's so unpredictable, and that's what I like. I love spontaneity. I don't ever want to be bored, doing the same thing from 9 to 5.

It's something that I love about this business and that scares me about this business, but in a good way. You just never know what's going to happen. And things change constantly. But there's always opportunities for new work, so you just have to enjoy the job that you're on while you're on it because it doesn't last forever.

As an actor, you know, I love not being pigeonholed, which is great. No one really knows who I am. So that's a positive.

I have had a pretty hardcore crash course on living out of a suitcase. Some people take consistency in their lives for granted. When you have little to none, you discover it's kind of a nice thing.

I love not knowing what's going to happen next. With work, you never know. You rehearse and strive and get it right sometimes, and still you never know. Some people are like that with their marriages. They work and strive and labour and toil at them. God, what a bore! What an unromantic bore!

Thankfully, I have a background as an actor, and you learn how to live in that world of not knowing what's going to happen next.

I'm not afraid of chaos and I'm happy talking to strangers. I really love not knowing where I'm going.

It always amazed me - it still does - that people offer me work. And when the theater was my basic bread and butter, every time a show finished, I was convinced I would never work again.

I don't really care about job security.

As an actor, you always feel like you're not going to work again. You're always unsure about how things are going to work out, and you start thinking you're going to just fade off into the distance.

I think most actors will say they always feel like they'll never work again.

As a profession, freelance writing is notoriously insecure. That's the first argument in its favor. For many reasons, a few of them rational, the thought of knowing exactly what next year's accomplishments, routine, income, and vacation will be - or even what time I have to get up tomorrow morning - has always depressed me.

Acting isn't a sure thing. We're not set to have jobs for the rest of lives, and fame is really fickle.

For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity.

Work is fun to me. All those years of being an actor and a director and not being able to get a job - two weeks is too long to not know what my next job will be.

I don't always have to be on what is the newest in music is. I'm slowly educating myself in music. For me, I feel more free in not knowing everything in what I'm doing. You can start making up too many rules for yourself. It should just be love and fun and feeling good.

With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.

When I turn down work, I feel guilty, I feel terrible; I don't know where the next job is going to come from.

I don't ever know where I'm going. Because one of the wonderful things about writing, which is different than working in programming, you don't need to know. You could just write and discover where you're going. And it's a great deal of fun.

I've never been in jeopardy, but being an actor is a pretty shady place to be because you never know where your next job is.

I've always been sort of addicted to genre-jumping. I've never been in the mood to do the same thing I did last time. Hence, me going from 'Big Love' to romantic comedy, to period film... I can't sit still.

I am no longer sure that when I go out there and do my job it'll even see the light of air, if the experience of my network colleagues is anything to go by.