“I love the stage too much. Now I actually see far more films than I do theatre, but it’s the place where I think you really learn the most. So many of these great actors constantly dip back into it, even if they primarily concentrate on film. It’s a real testing ground for an actor, I hope I never leave it behind.”

“Ben Whishaw returns to the Almeida to star in a new play by American writer Christopher Shinn, directed by Ian Rickson. ‘Against’ is set in ‘Silicon Valley. The future’ and follows an aerospace billionaire’s attempt to change the world, convinced God is talking to him.”

“Every week we’d drive down and get cheap tickets for these incredible shows, so all my idols when I was teenager, weirdly, were theatre actors. Before that, I remember watching films and I think that’s probably when I realised that there was this thing called ‘an actor’, but seeing Michael Gambon, Mark Rylance and people like that give astonishing performances when I was fourteen – they were the people that I remember seeing and going: ‘Wow, what is that that they’re doing? It’s so powerful.’”

“

In our cold, damp Brexit-ing London, there’s a little ray of sunshine on the horizon. A certain Peruvian bear of diminutive stature is returning to our screens. Filming has just started on the sequel to ‘Paddington’, last year’s triumphant and giddy-goose eccentric film of Michael Bond’s books about the marmalade-loving bear with a rumble in his tummy.

Ben Whishaw is returning as the voice of Paddington (who was based on a teddy bear Michael Bond bought in Selfridges for his wife in Christmas 1956). Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Julie Walters and Peter Capaldi will also be making a comeback.

The lovely thing about the first film was its inclusive message about how London welcomes newcomers and diversity. As our global film editor, Dave Calhoun, wrote at the time: ‘The film is a quiet two-claws-up to xenophobia.’ We can’t wait to see what writer-director Paul King will have to say about Little Englanders this time around.

The new film finds Paddington happily settled into Notting Hill. He gets into a spot of bother when a book he buys for Aunt Lucy’s hundredth birthday is stolen. Hugh Grant joins the cast as a local west London celebrity – a vain and charming actor – while Brendan Gleeson plays a notorious safe-cracker.

”

“Dwarfed by the old prison chapel in which he read, Whishaw looked forlorn and wretched but practised restraint, bringing out the pathos rather than the pettiness of the ruined man’s prose. ‘Suffering, curious as it may sound to you, is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing,’ read Whishaw to a room stilled by his words”

“At the moment I’m not managing to read much more than Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot because I’m working on a multimedia adaptation of it on stage at the National Theatre. I first read it when I was 18 or 19. I couldn’t have understood much of it but it stirred my imagination. I find I understand it more on a deeper level now. My other man of the moment is the 12th-century Persian mystic and whirling dervish and poet Rumi. I read his poems every day. They are teaching me how to live.”