In England they always try out new mobile phones in Isle of Man. They've got a captive society. So I said, you should try the legalization of all drugs on the Isle of Man and see what happens.
I vowed I would do everything I could to stop the Isle of Man counting towards the world championship. And it was stopped, so they love me in the Isle of Man.
We did have that, in the background of the character and the show, 'Mindhorn,' set on the Isle of Man, that every episode they would have to mention the temperate microclimate of the Isle of Man.
A lot of people in the Isle of Man support me and it makes it all worthwhile when people are interested in what you're doing. I dunno if the word 'famous' is appropriate, but I'm quite well known on the Isle of Man.
At age 10 or 12 he's going to boarding school in the Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight is, of course, down at the bottom of England just off South Hampton.
There's a school of thought that says if you legalize drugs it will solve the problem. We're all good liberals, we said let's do it and see what happens. We wanted to be honest about it. So in our brainstorming sessions we'd say, what if? The finding was that all the negative things came out also. The answer is that we didn't believe in the full legalization of drugs. But we don't believe in the criminalization of drugs, either.
Britain beat us to the abolition of slavery; the Isle of Man, New Zealand, and Finland all decided to give women the vote well before the United States. Eventually, we got smart and borrowed these egalitarian innovations.
Dad was a manager at Newport, over on the Isle of Wight. I remember going from Portsmouth on the hovercraft to the Isle of Wight for games with my mum.
I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What's the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.
When I was growing up in the Isle of Man with ambitions of being a performer, I really wanted to go to see a Broadway show.
Once the war started, my grandfather went to England, where he was under house arrest on the Isle of Man, and then to Ireland, but not to Germany. In no way did he, or my grandmother for that matter, ever support either the war or the Holocaust.
I have a house in a small town in Tuscany where everybody knows and looks out for each other. That's a similar mentality to on the Isle of Man.
I like going to Burning Man, for example. That's an environment where people can try out different things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out some new things and figure out what is the effect on society, what's the effect on people, without having to deploy kind of into the normal world.
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.
It is so rare to meet with a man outdoors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands. Behind every man's busy-ness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface.
We've got a national campaign by drug legalizers, in my view, to try and use medicinal uses of drugs and legalization of hemp as a stalking horse to get in under the radar screen.
People always try to palm me weed when I'm always talking about how I don't smoke weed. But they always try to ... and when they stop offering me weed, then I'm going to feel kind of out of touch, like: "What did I do wrong that you won't offer me drugs that I don't do?" Because I'll trade those drugs out for drugs that I do do.