A car to pick me up every day, a chair with my name on it, everybody being very polite... what can you do except sit back and watch it all, try to take it all in?

It's a question of keeping one's eyes and ears open and watching how other people play the game. They're watching me too, to see what my attitude is like.

We get a successful television series or something, and next season they give you less time and less money, which is something I've never really understood. That doesn't happen with Game of Thrones.

I'm playing one of the principal roles, which gives you more clout and more confidence.

Because [writers] Dan Weiss and David Benioff have done such a great job in adapting them, that's what we work with. It serves no purpose to anybody for actors to come onto a set with a well-thumbed copy of the source material and start querying why this or that line has been left out of the script. It's probably been left out for a good reason.

There is a huge fan base, they're very knowledgeable and very loyal. I was astonished - before I started working on the series I didn't know anything about Game of Thrones. I hadn't heard of the books. When it started going out, people were coming up to me in the street saying [fake cockney accent] "oh, Game of Thrones, f------ wonderful.

When you get to a certain age, the work begins to thin out.