I love characters who are clever and smart, and you have to run to catch up with. I think there's something very appealing and rather heroic in that.

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.

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.

There's a morality... I think there's a moral compass but whether that comes from religion or just from being a good person, and where one starts and the other begins... 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.

I remember a conversation with my parents about who the people on the TV were, and learning they were actors and they acted out this story and just thinking that was the most fantastic notion, and that's what I want to do.

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

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.