No Western government has ever played the long-term in terms of foreign policy.

I have a three-year-old and a four-year-old at home, and my mornings are about just dealing with the fact of that. I oddly enjoy it.

It's certainly true that I was brought up in that British amateur tradition, the one which always held that if you were reasonably good at cricket, knew one or two Latin texts and a few zingy Oscar Wilde quotes for dinner parties, you were pretty much ready to go and run some outpost in Hindustan.

You can't do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, 'It wasn't my film, I was just doing a job in it.'

It's an unfair comparison because when things are developed in the UK, they're developed at script stage only.

The best shows succeed because they tap into a national conversation.

I think you can't be really posh and be an interesting actor. I'm a bit of a posh rough.