It was great. I got to hang out with him [Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins], and I kept a straight face for a bit and then I started giggling because I know Martin, I don't know Bilbo. For Martin to be sitting there playing Bilbo is amazing. He's going to be amazing, he's going to be fantastic in this film.

I had a very sparse comic upbringing - not because I was being whipped into reading Chekhov and Dickens, but I read Asterix on holidays when I was a kid, and Tin Tin was featured, I remember, for a few years.

I tend to have a cup of tea, try to stop worrying about what I did wrong, cool down and will the audience back in as soon as possible.

When you freefall for 7,000 feet it doesn't feel like you're falling: it feels like you're floating, a bit like scuba diving.

Fame is a weird one. You need to distance yourself from it. People see a value in you that you don't see yourself.

When you start getting jobs, and see your mates from drama school, you don't really want to talk about it, because you have this innate sense of guilt that it's not fair that others aren't doing exactly what you're doing. I do have that.

Scott Derrickson breathes humour into a character with a very strong identity in the '60s and '70s, that psychedelia era of Eastern mysticism meeting the West.