I love theater work because of the immediate effect your performance has on the audience. And I love the repetition, I love getting on the same stage for more than a month and reciting the same lines, trying to make a small or large step towards an improvement in my acting.

I think enjoying each other in a creative way is usually a result of when you're doing something that might be problematic - might be a little difficult to uncover. I've done it once in a stage production; we came in for two days and, just as an experiment, the director had us reading each other's roles. You hear another voice interpreting a line that maybe you were having trouble with. It can be very helpful. But we weren't really in the kind of situation where that was necessary.

Character actors aren't a brand in the same way that high-profile leading men are.

Playing villains is very liberating because unlike the leading man, nothing is expected of you. Leading men have to look good, they have to behave in a certain way, they have to fulfill an audience's expectations. But as a bad guy, you have free license to take the audience by surprise. And that's what audiences want - they want unpredictability from their villains. The villain's job is to subvert it.

Even at drama school if there was a part of some eastern European thug it would be me.

The worst thing that an actor can do is go into any project with a lack of respect for the material. You can have an opinion about it, but you have to respect yourself in doing it.

I think it would be a problem if Hollywood was casting British actors only as villains; if that were the case, then certainly there would be cause for concern.