I've done a lot of very low-budget indie films, so it was just really exciting and fun to be doing a film where there's a lot more time and these huge, vast sets. I was like a kid in a playground. It was amazing!

I always had a very strong sense of independence.

Day to day, I always wear eyeliner on my top lid and mascara. I like to do my own makeup, it depends on the event.

I think [Charles] Dickens was an extrovert and Nelly [Ternan] an introvert, and I think that Nelly saw beyond the fame and adulation and she actually loved Dickens essentially for who he was. So I think he felt like she was someone he could be himself with.

I really enjoyed it - being involved in watching rushes and playback [in "The Invisible Woman"]. Ralph [Fiennes] was very open to my input, I think knowing that he couldn't always be there 100 percent, that he had dual aims with directing and acting.

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 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."