I love the idea of playing something stupid or romantic. I'm not the smartest man in the room. I listen, and I learn, and I observe, but I'm always playing characters with intellects profoundly superior to mine. That's great fun, even though it's as much a fantasy for me as for the people watching me.

[Season 4 of Sherlock Holmes will be] myopically dark. You're talking about the end of the universe darkness. You can't see in front of you and would walk into everything dark.

Mum did a lot of commercial theatre and farces in the 1980s and '90s to make sure the school bills were paid.

I think now with fundamentalists, people who treat belief with a total lack of humor or empathy for any other viewpoint than their own - they, to me, are the enemy. And those people are born out of desperate extremes.

When you're a kid, 'Star Trek' is a slower burn. It's funny, it's entertaining, but it also has a maturity about it - which is its universal appeal, I think.

If you can't jump on board when the ride's going past that's it, it usually goes by, so the hugest compliment they paid me was to come back to me. It motivated me to try to fulfill their faith.

I had a real yearning to make use of the opportunities I had at school. When I heard about the gap year of teaching English at a Tibetan monastery, I knew I had to do something about it really quickly, otherwise it was going to get allocated.