I like being called 'Mr. Freeman' occasionally.

I don't like affectation.

With superheroes and comics and fantasy and sci-fi being absolutely the popular currency in cinema, it's like people have said in endless magazines, it's the revenge of the geeks and all that. There's some truth in that.

I did a play once where a reviewer said, 'Martin Freeman's too nice to play a bad guy.' And I thought: 'Well, bad guys aren't always bad guys, you know?' When I see someone play the obvious villain, I know it's false.

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

Like any friendship or marriage, familiarity breeds more contempt, and love, and everything.