When preparing for a role, a month is a luxury. Sometimes you've maybe got two weeks before you start on something. So you have to learn how to do it quickly. And the longer you have a role, that it lives in your imagination, the more you're going to be able to contribute when you get on set. Because it's really about your subconscious having time to sit with the part, so you're out doing something and then something occurs to you, you know?

People are fascinated by evil because it's mysterious and it doesn't seem to have a rational behind it.

I was 17, and all I wanted to do was to get away from England and the awful, boring boarding schools I'd been going to there. The last one was taught by monks, and I couldn't wait to get out.

I've done quite a lot of dying on shows and in movies. To have a good death scene though - come on, it's brilliant. I love a good death scene!

If you don't look like Rupert Graves or Hugh Grant, they'll have you playing the gardener.

People are fascinated by evil because its mysterious and it doesnt seem to have a rationale behind it, and the second you say that Hannibal Lector was abducted as a child and he had to eat his sister or something like that, it becomes immediately mundane. The character becomes mundane.

When you see natural disasters caught on film you realize how well they had been imagined by Hollywood for such a long time. It's all good fun. You never know who's gonna survive and who doesn't.