"I spent my moviegoing life avoiding Ingmar Bergman movies. A few glimpses of The Seventh Seal or Persona made me think they were not accessible. I also knew Woody Allen worshipped him, so surely they were over my head. It was while working on my Ikea-sponsored web series Easy to Assemble that I thought: Well, if I’m going to be satirizing Swedish culture, I should watch some Bergman. He became the director from whom I have learned the most. He gave me the courage not to shy away from pain, which is the core of all comedy. The results are apparent in “Finding North,” an episode in Easy to Assemble’s third season, and all my writing since. I chose Wild Strawberries because in it I found the key that changed my work forever. I always lived in a daydream, where sometimes things felt real and sometimes they felt imagined. So much of an actor’s life is imagination. Wild Strawberries is a road-trip movie about an old man who looks back at his life, his loves, his regrets, and has to face certain truths about himself. The story is not revealed by flashbacks, though. It’s revealed by going from reality to daydream. He reflects on his past with a nostalgia for childhood. This makes reality feel more present and his relationship with his grown son and daughter-in-law more uncomfortable. Have you ever been in the presence of someone having an argument and thought, I can’t believe they revealed that to me? That is every scene in a Bergman film! After his wife died, Bergman said, “I was in a room built of my own sorrow.” No other sentence expresses the pain of losing a loved one in such a poetic way. His words are so revealing, and coupled with the right emotions, the right images, they bring me as close to the human experience as anything I have experienced in a film. There is another reason Wild Strawberries has a special place in my heart. In 2013, because of my involvement in Easy to Assemble, I was cast in a Swedish-American show called Welcome to Sweden. I like to imagine that Bergman had a hand in that. I shot a scene with Lena Olin in which we picked wild strawberries. It was not imagined, though. That really happened!"

"Stevie Wonder has been one of my biggest influences as a songwriter. His ability to tell a story and still move you, and still entertain you, and still make you want to dance, I just think is complete genius – and then watching his concerts and watching him switch between different instruments! ""At the same time, what I have the most admiration for is that he managed to put a socio-political message into his music. 'Big Brother' is a beautiful song to listen to, but he’s also saying very important things and speaking to his people. I just think, what an amazing man, and what an amazing song. He’s speaking about government and politicians, and these bureaucratic arguments that are happening – the reality of life and what impact these decisions people are making in an office are having on real people; how many people are dying, and the conditions people are living in. I think he’s really shining a light on the reality of the ordinary person, and particularly on the black community – how flippantly some decisions may be made, and the gravity of what that means for the ordinary person. ""With Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone, the commitment to being the spokesperson for the community is so admirable. The point of music, in many senses for me, is that you speak for people who may not necessarily have a voice. If you have this platform, you have this amazing ability to express yourself through music – which has so many colours to express in. ""I love how eloquently he made his points, with this simple, memorable melody. I love hip-hop so much, and there’s different ways to have a message and to express different emotions, but to do it in such a melodic way that you could sing along to? I just thought that was so clever: to express frustration and anger, but to find beauty in it at the same time. ""His reference to Big Brother also speaks of now so much more than then, in the sense of technology. He prophesied it. And he says “I live in the ghetto / You just come to visit me 'round election time” – that manipulation speaks of the times we’re in now. It inspires me – there could always be more reflection on the very unique times we’re in"

"I came to Beefheart late. As a youngster, a lot of the older lads were into Beefheart but I didn’t like the way they dressed or their attitude I didn’t think they were cool. They were borderline radical hippies and I wasn’t having any of that. It didn’t look like fun to me. So I steered cleared of Beefheart. And then years later, somebody sat me down and played me Trout Mask Replica and I went, "oh my GOD!" and went out and bought everything. It was his use of language – he was writing like an abstract impressionist painter, fusing together chunks of English language that made more sense to me than something written straight. He was writing emotions through raw chunks of images that were coming to him. He was the first lyricist that made complete sense to me. Then I read that this music that I’d thought was badly played was in fact played amazingly well. He would write these very emotional piano pieces and then hand them to the guitarist who was the MD (musical director) and say, score that for the whole band to play. Often they weren’t even played to a rhythm – they were kinda random – and the band had to play along with them. They’re astonishing renditions of something that is so abstract that it needs great musicians to play them. He was fusing the blues and finding new ways of playing it. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) is one of his later albums where he returned to the style which people loved – trying to be less commercial than his Virgin Records years. There’s a track called ‘Tropical Hot Dog Night’, (quotes lyrics) “like two flamingos in a fruit fight… Everything’s wrong, at the same time it’s right… Like steppin’ out of a triangle into striped light” – and this reminded me of my drinking years. That’s exactly what it was like, where you’re in shadow and you’re in white light. This man knows exactly what’s going on in my head. He wrote such beautiful poetry. In later life, I made contact with him through Anton Corbijn and he’d send me music of his that wasn’t quite so well known. But I never got to meet him sadly. As a painter he was a massive influence on me because his titles were so fantastic. I take that same approach when I’m titling paintings for exhibition."