Top 30 Douglas Henshall Quotes

Every job I still think ‘I wonder if this is the one they’re going to sack me for’.

But as an actor, you spend the majority of your life being rejected.

When you’re young, there are always going to be one or two people who take a shine to you or get you and want to help you. Thank God for them.

I’m interested in how people interact with the landscape around them, and the effect that has.

Fundamentally, I do a job at which I can make a living and I like it. That’s the bottom line. I still really enjoy it. I like getting up and going to work. I’ve spent my whole adult creative life doing this.

The Catholic Church is wealthier than Coca-Cola, but takes from some of the poorest people in the world.

After my marriage ended – a hundred years ago – I had a few memorable Christmases on my own: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

I’ll lie awake and think about scenes I could have done better, that I could have filmed in a different way.

Where I was brought up, if you were walking down the street and you looked at someone and they looked at you, you acknowledged them.

One of the first jobs I did out of drama school was a panto at the Magnum.

I got to be in a western, which was the best fun ever. It’s one of those boxes you tick. I’ve wanted to be in a western since I was seven and suddenly I got to go out there and be a sheriff, ride a horse and have the badge, firing a Smith & Wesson.

In some respects, I was almost a country boy. I ran around in streams and rivers and all that sort of thing.

I’m sure there are people who associate Iona with what they want it to be but for me it’s just a nice place.

Sometimes it’s easy for things get away from you, a little bit, if you have too many people coming in all the time, trying to put their mark on it. If something is successful, you don’t have to do that. All you have to do is keep doing what you’re doing, or have been doing.

God, when I was about nine or ten years old, my whole summers were spent playing tennis. I was there from when it opened till when it closed. They had to kick me off the courts, I loved it so much.

For me, the best thing is the young actors that come in to the series as to see the depth and breadth of talent coming into the business is fantastic.

Well you know, there’s a lot of people on Shetland who’ve never been to Fair Isle. The place itself is very unique but also the people there were fantastic. They couldn’t have done enough for us.

Flying to Fair Isle from Lerwick is an experience I’ll never forget.

I’m the only emotional frame of reference I’ve got.

Ninety percent of the time when you see rape on the television it is gratuitous and there to either bolster viewing figures or as a lazy way of treating female cast.

I always think that your first test of loyalty as a young lad is your football team.

It’s one of those weird things you start doing: you get to have on-screen teenage children and play policemen. That’s what happens to you when you hit 40.

We were in Shetland for over a month so when we arrived back in Glasgow I felt quite disorientated. It was just everything, the noise, the people. It was weird that after just a month in Shetland I felt slightly assaulted by the city.

I started doing more theatre because I love that and I ended up doing television. I ended up doing it.

It’s been great being on location in Shetland and out in the fresh air.

I don’t think I am someone who sits on someone else’s coat tails while others do worthwhile work.

Normally, I bolt at the idea of playing anyone for too long because I don’t want it to become dull and like another job.

I always feel I’d like to just play people who are a bit less complicated.

I had a film career in the late 90s. And then I stopped having a film career because suddenly I didn’t do anything.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, my dad wouldn’t take me to Ibrox or Parkhead because of all the sectarianism.