I made films with my brothers and my cousins and if any of the films ever come to fruition my career will be in ruins because the acting, writing, and directing is so unbelievably, heinously bad. We once screened one for my grandfather, this film that we had painstakingly made over a couple of days when we were all 10 years old, and he sat there and he said, "This is the worst film I've ever seen." No sympathy whatsoever.

I suppose it's really satisfying to play someone with secrets. It's really satisfying to decide how and when those things are going to start being revealed, and how subtle to be.

My grandfather told me that I should have a series of headshots, one with a tennis racket, one dressed as a naval officer, and one dressed as a cheeky chappie. He said, "If you have those headshots, the world is your oyster."

I'm incredibly grateful for Sophie Barthes, I'll always be incredibly grateful for her being generous enough to believe in what I thought. And it was just lucky that I met the right person.

My first professional audition - god, I've never told anybody about this - was for a test commercial, I think it was for Xbox. It involved me getting kidnapped by a granny who wanted to play the Xbox. It was very weird and I definitely had no idea what I was doing. I actually got the gig. It wasn't a commercial; it was what directors did when they wanted to show the company what they would do with a commercial.

I wasn't particularly prolific at sport, and I could get by at school, but I wasn't going to win any prizes. Suddenly people were slapping me on the back and saying that I was funny and talented. So I just knew that it felt good to be appreciated, basically. Whenever I got an opportunity to do some acting I did a little bit more.

There was still an element in acting, certainly for my dad, of like, "This is lunacy." But then once my parents could tell that I was serious, it was like, "Okay then."