My ambition is to keep the audience guessing... that is my path to a long career.

The wonderful situation that I find myself in now, is that choosing the roles I want is more of a reality for me. As a result, I take it very seriously, because I find this opportunity in film to be a very powerful and influential medium.

One of the things I have an allergic reaction to playing, especially as a black actor, is the mandatory kind of best friend/cop/detective type. You will never see me in that movie.

I think that having a black president in America has been a seismic shift, in terms of what has been going on racially in America. I think that America is now engaging with how we have come to this point.

One of the things the BBC does better than anyone is period drama.

I think the notion that we are different just because of skin color, and that we should be kept apart or kept from interbreeding, is very hurtful.

There is still a fundamental misunderstanding, when it comes to observing that when someone is black and someone is white, then that difference is enough to warrant the idea that they shouldn't be together. We are so much more alike in nature than we are different, and my ambition with the roles I choose to do is to break down that prejudice, by showing how much I - as a man - am just a man.