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.

I love playing sport.

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.'

You know what it's like to feel anxious - it's horrible feeling anxious. It's stressful having that feeling, having butterflies in your stomach, even for a day, and you don't sleep at night.

I was, if you like, a successful schoolboy in that I had a degree of talent in all the required things that make you a success at school.

Dramatically it's always more interesting to conceal rather than reveal things.

I guess I'm just good at playing repressed individuals. I'm lucky because those are often the roles that catch people's eyes.