An accent has to do with the way your mouth works and the sounds that come out of your head, but somehow it informs everything about you.

It's very hard to be objective about something you're in, especially when you set it up against things that you experienced as a child.

All roads seem to have come back to Doctor Who in our life. But, no, it was a huge part of my growing up. I was a massive fan and it certainly inspired me to get into acting and to be ... one of those people that tells stories on TV. That was a huge part of my childhood.

I always like seeing people transforming themselves, in whatever way that might be, and a different accent is part of that.

I think doing different accents is part of the job of acting, really. It's something else that I quite enjoy the challenge of, to be honest.

It has to be said that the bad guys are often more interesting than the good guys because you get to indulge part of your nature that hopefully gets subsumed most of the time. But I just like playing interesting characters, and variety's the spice of that, as it is with life, I suppose.

And the very fact of how you speak somehow influences who you are. The way you move, the way you think, it seeps into your being, and it's quite hard to really break that down entirely.