I'm a real geek. I love spending time researching a character and reading about them.

I like Nelly's [Ternan] quiet inner strength. I thought there was something about her predicament that I found interesting - that she didn't want to be a floozy mistress, a bit on the side, that she had more self-respect than that.

It's nice to have some continuity you can come back to. I feel that in coming home, coming back to London.

My mother [was in advertising and] worked incredibly hard when she was bringing us up. She was a working mother and a working single parent.

"The Invisible Woman" was about trying to show this conflict in [Nelly Ternan] woman truthfully, between her own identity, but also being in love with someone who I think made very high demands from her.

We live in a time where it's more surprising if people are actually together than if they're having affairs.

My mother was in the kind of late-sixties, early-seventies origins of female emancipation. And she was very much like, "You're not going to be defined by how you look. It's going to be about who you are and what you do."