At home I have a Tibetan terrier. I'm still not sure if he's a genius or very thick. It's a fine line.

I have an excellent internal compass.

It's never happened to me before, in my career, and never will again. It's a one-off experience. It's a rare treat to have a cast together for six years. Crews come and go, and a few of them have been there throughout, but not many. It's rare, in my experience, after 26 years, to have had a proper company in a show that enjoys each other's company, and who is such a fine bunch of people and actors. To have struck a chord with people, and to have had that combination, is extremely rare.

At 19, you know everything; by the time you're 40, you haven't got a clue.

The press mainly want to destroy a program by revealing what's coming up. For some reason, soaps like doing that.

You have no idea what's going to happen [in Downton Abbey] until you get the script. We roughly knew a couple of the key points that were going to happen, but when I got the last episode, I turned to the last page to check that I was still alive.

I've often been the guy who doesn't get the girl.