The question
If you could revise one chapter of your past, what would you change?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Repeated verbatim in The Guardian's long-running Saturday Q&A; two publisher-hosted examples establish recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I would try and get to being comfortable with myself quicker.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 6 September 2025 source ↗
I don’t have anything that I want to change. I’m sure I did in the past but I can’t recall, which means it wasn’t that big a deal.
I’d give my younger self the lessons I’ve learned over the years, sparing myself the need to figure everything out so publicly.
I would do a lot more investments.
I don’t think I’d change anything: the bad forms you more than the good.
My partner was doing a play in Hong Kong last year and I went to visit him, and I bought him a beautiful teacup. But I didn’t look at the price tag before I took it to the till and it was £100, the most expensive teacup imaginable.
Someone said that I had a laugh like Jimmy Carr.
Mistaking shyness for not having anything to say.
You can only do one thing at a time.
Not getting to the point.
Last year, during four days in January, when I directed Rhoda, my second short film, in a tiny house in Camberwell with Juliet Stevenson and Emma D’Arcy.
Juliet Stevenson, Harry Redknapp, Bryn Terfel, Emma Bunton, Katharine Hamnett, Toby Stephens
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