I've always been a geek and slightly awkward… slightly umm… I was never the cool kid at school.

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.

When you're playing a real person there's a balance between playing the person in the script and playing the person as he was in life. You have to be respectful and true to who that person was, but at the same time tell the story in the film.

I was always going to act, literally ever since I was tiny. In fact, I have Doctor Who to thank for that. I wanted to become an actor after being obsessed with Tom Baker, the fourth Doctor Who, in the 1970s. His was the definitive performance of all time in anything.

Moths are the ones that freak me out. It's something to do with the way that, if they get squashed, they turn to dust. There's something very wrong about that. It all feels a bit Gothic.

I think if my eight-year-old self could see me at the Royal Albert Hall winning a prize for playing the Doctor on telly, he would need a stiff shot of Irn-Bru.

I'm a good person, I hope. But I'm never as good as I want to be, never as nice as I want to be, never as generous as I want to be.