I do listen to myself sometimes and think, 'Is my moral compass so easily swayed by the characters I play, or is it me growing as a human being?'

I never felt totally, 100%, patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon, and Damascus, and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.

Second films are, you know, like 'difficult second albums', so it's a tricky position to be in but I think he's made a highly accomplished film.

When I was in theater I was forever trying to inhabit a space which puts yourself under the microscope as an actor and your personality and your take on life, but actually through another portal of a character.

The matter is - we are actors playing roles [in Planet Apes] and they happen to be in this instance apes but there's no difference. In the scenes that we're playing, if we were to block out the scenes as actors in costumes, it would be no different.

35mm film isn't ticking away so it's subconscious - performances are allowed to breathe in a much more real way I think.

When you come out of the other end of a long process, working with a character [you realize] this character has really shaped my ideas.