It's a strange thing, but you get this click in your brain; the wonderful feeling that the entirety of a character is suddenly available and accessible to you.

I started working as an actor, semi-professionally, when I was 16, and got my first professional gig at 19. I guess I've kind of worked pretty consistently since then.

I'm constantly discovering things. Like Bobby Bland. Right now I suppose I'm into the Eighties, which turned out to be a great musical period.

I try to just be open to what the next experience is and how it makes me feel, just reading a project, or trying to get involved with a project, or thinking about a project, and what particular emotional flavor that brings. To me, it's never really about planning the next thing, or the career arc. It's about investigating how I feel, from project to project, and finding things that I haven't explored and what that would be like.

I like to disappear into a role. I equate the success of it with a feeling of being chemically changed.

This is going to sound completely absurd, but I do sometimes feel like the enjoyment of an awards ceremony or the pride in the finished article hasn't ever surpassed the joy of doing the work, of making it. The doing it is really the bit I'm there for.

I've always enjoyed doing a huge variety of roles, which I think helps, instead of settling for the things I might be most comfortable with.