I draw and play the piano badly. But when I’m doing those things, I’m concentrating so hard there’s no room for worry. I find that onstage, too.

Ladies and babies, and mortgages, for that matter, can all wait. Acting has done a strange thing to me, though. I often sit there, thinking, 'I love this, but I wouldn't put my daughter on the stage.'

If you're an English actor and turn up in America, they don't have an opinion about where you sit. They have no idea what auditions to send you to, so they send you to everything.

I did an interview once where I was asked who I found attractive and I went on about cartoons and Nala from 'The Lion King' - and it's a bit weird but various of my ex-girlfriends actually did look like Nala.

I draw and play the piano badly. But when I’m doing those things, I’m concentrating so hard there’s no room for worry. I find that onstage, too.

On so many levels, acting in film and TV is so much the sum of its parts, and somewhere in there, there's an alchemical thing that makes something happen or not - that makes something connect or not. Now, of course you want to make work that people see, but the enjoyment I get out of acting is playing characters.

I'm just one gigantic ball of rancid fear and self-consciousness. I'm entirely fueled by fear, so the fact that I knew it could be a catastrophic disaster made me unable to sleep, and made me work quite hard.