I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.

When I did make the decision to focus on acting, I think my mother was just relieved for me that I had finally started to focus.

I don't deal at all well with the relative amount of stuff I have to face already.

You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film - you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

I hate the domestic life.

Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.