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.

If you only take parts that are offered to you, you end up playing the same roles over and over again. I think it's important to keep auditioning. I think it's important to scare yourself; to take parts that are outside of your comfort zone.

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.

I thought if I went somewhere where I didn't know anybody and they didn't know me I could start all over again.

I audition for stuff all the time, and what's weird about it is that one's success rate at auditioning doesn't really change. It's sort of at the same ratio of stuff you audition for to things you land.

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.

Marriages had different meanings back then than they do now, they were used to cement agreements between families, business deals and things like that. The idea of marriages being arranged for love is some sort of modern idea, really.