"Being Irish is very much a part of who I am. I take it everywhere with me."

(On people who drink tequila) "I tell them, 'When you're at home puking your guts out, I'll be here drinking my Amstel Light.'"

"I couldn't care less about who sees my bits ... My friends asked how I could do scenes like that and not get excited, but it wasn't like that. My bits looked the size of a cashew nut!" (on appearing nude in Tigerland (2000)).

[on physical training for film roles] "I find it the most tedious waste of life. It's so boring. I'd prefer to be sitting in a pub with a few strangers talkin' shit than looking at meself in the mirror runnin' on the treadmill."

"It all goes back to [Joel Schumacher]. I wouldn't have done Phone Booth (2002) without him. I wouldn't be doing Hart's War (2002). I probably wouldn't have done American Outlaws (2001) if he hadn't picked me out of obscurity. I've worked, but not at the level or people I'm working with now if he hadn't taken a chance on an Irish kid playing a Texan."

"I'm in no hurry to get anywhere. I don't have any plans. I don't have a map. If you did in this business, you'd destroy yourself."

On Hollywood: I'm not seduced by it all. I swear to God. I'm easily pleased, yeah. Don't get me wrong, I'll indulge in it. I'll be in Los Angeles for two weeks and I'll have a laugh, get battered and have a buzz, but at the end of the day, I'll go home. It's just me earning a few more stories to tell everyone at home and all.

"It kind of went downhill, I was smoking a bit of reef. You know, you roll your first joint, drink your first beer and discover the girls and, well, that was it. I loved football, but I couldn't make the training any more" - on his football aspirations as a youth

"I do have the ability to explore life and to be over the moon at the smallest thing - a few pints and a craic in the pub and I'm in heaven. But I have a melancholy side to me as well. Acting allows me to feel things, it kind of buys me human experience. And I don't mean this as acting as higher cause, because it's not, but it does kind of have a higher awareness emotionally."

"I work my arse off. I'm never late, ask anyone. I'm only 27. I don't feel like a big star. I feel neither the pressure nor the grandeur of my situation, you know. I think I'm still trying to find my feet as an actor. And I know it ain't brain surgery, but it confuses me and it comes between me and my sleep a lot"

"I'm just a true Irish boy at heart. I'm just myself, I stick by my guns and I treat people the way I think they should be treated, regardless of their status. And I just have a laugh"

(On the girl that will interest him) "The usual obvious bullshit. Sense of humour, a bit of danger, good fun. A good heart is a really sexy thing. All women have the potential to be sexy and it's nothing to do with the dress someone wears or the make-up they put on their face, it's the aged-old cliche saying: 'What comes from inside'. God, I've met gorgeous women who I'd fancy and give one to, but at the end of the day they're not particularly sexy because they haven't got much going inside and they are too concerned with themselves. And then I've met women who wouldn't be as nearly as attractive and, because of the sense of fun they have and their joi de vivre, as they say, they'd be much sexier and you'd fall for them in a nanosecond"