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.

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?

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

I think at some point every actor has practiced their acceptance speech while they're having a shower. It's fun.

In the old patrician world there was a custom once a week you had to eat a meal with your slaves and get to know them as people.

When you're at drama school you spend so much time working on amazing texts and analyzing them, digging into them, and figuring out why it happens, why you are being asked to say what you're saying, and what the words mean. But then when you start working, most of the stuff would just fall apart if you subject it to that kind of scrutiny.

I like the adrenaline of live performance, whatever that is, appearing in front of an audience of any kind, whether it's one or a hundred or a thousand. It gives you a buzz of adrenaline, its exciting. The thing about that is that you want to make those nerves work for you in terms of an energy that's appropriate for the part and the performance, and not to distract the people who are watching so that they become nervous for you.