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

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.

I still am a geek, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I see no shame in having an unhealthy obsession with something.

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.

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 often stop when I'm doing something, in the middle of rehearsals or some other job, and I try to take a minute to think "Okay, this might be as good as it gets, so drink it in, appreciate it now". So far, I've been lucky because another job has always come along to equal the last.

We seem to spend a lot of our time in very small spaces spouting a lot of dialogue very quickly.