What book is on your night stand now?
I am getting ready to film an adaptation for TV of Thomas Harris’s novels, so currently there is serial-killer literature scattered throughout our home. I am also reading a biography of Mao (possibly same genre) and “Small Mediums at Large,” by Terry Iacuzzo.

Paper or electronic? Do you take notes? Do you snack while you read?
Paper. I only take notes if I’m researching something and, yes, I snack. It would be more accurate to say that I read while I snack. And travel, and bathe, and most everything else.

Do you ever read plays for pleasure? Any favorites? A favorite playwright?
Yes. I tend to go to the Strand bookstore and buy up a bunch of secondhand plays that I’m not familiar with. I guess part pleasure, part self-improvement. Recently I’ve been reading John Osborne.

Your father, Jonathan, is a professor of philosophy. Did you grow up reading or discussing philosophy? Do you read it now?
No, except that in a reverse of the usual child-parent dynamic it would be my father repeatedly asking “Why?” in response to whatever bland statement had come out of my mouth. He writes academic philosophy for his peers, which has about as much meaning for me as the technical handbook for a Boeing 747 would.

What were your most cherished books as a child? Do you have a favorite character or hero from one of those books? Is there one book you wish all children would read?
My granddad used to read us the William stories by Richmal Crompton, brilliantly, and gave all the characters real, unique voices. William himself is one of the great rebel-heroes. I’m also glad, from a literary point of view, that I read the Bible at some point, because it seemed to underpin so much of what I read (or was made to read) subsequently.

From “David Copperfield” to “Madame Bovary” to “Ella Enchanted,” you’ve starred in a number of literary adaptations. Do you have a favorite literary adaptation, whether TV or film?
Not so much because it’s a literary adaptation, but my favorite film, unoriginally, is “The Godfather.” I have no interest in reading the source material. Judged as an adaptation I would say the TV version of “Brideshead Revisited,” which supposedly contained every line of dialogue from the novel.

What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?
I wish David Mitchell had Philip Roth’s output.

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
That’s a tossup between Christopher Marlowe, D. H. Lawrence, Byron and the young Coleridge. I would be terrified of all of them.

Where do you get your books? Are you a downloader, online shopper, borrower, browser of used-book stores?
All the above, downloading excepted.

Do you tend to keep books, lend them out, throw them away?
My wife [the actress Claire Danes] says, “You don’t throw anything away.” Except that her answer included an expletive.

What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?
I am fairly omnivorous and mainly guilt-free, though when it became clear last year that “Venus in Fur” would stay on Broadway into June, I picked up the first “Game of Thrones” novel thinking I’d have plenty of time in my dressing room. I’m now five in, and eyeing the sixth like a junkie considering the last of his stash, i.e., with very mixed feelings.

What book do you plan to read next?
For reasons they’ll presumably never explain, the Pulitzer committee didn’t deign to award a prize for fiction this year. However, our friend Michael Cunningham, who was on the jury and therefore plowed through hundreds of books, recommends “Train Dreams,” by Denis Johnson, very highly.