The Railway Man was a particularly intense and immersive experience. I definitely got carried away. I lost about 35 pounds. I really was incredibly skinny and also quite unwell while we were filming. It wasn't very healthy. I don't recommend it. But then also doing the torture scenes, the water boarding stuff, there wasn't really any other way just to do it really.

I'd love to get fat on camera. Wouldn't that be great? I'll tell you what's almost as hard though, getting bulked up, getting that big. Here we are in LA and you see guys walking down the street and everyone looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's really quite grim, if you haven't done it before.

The work my mum does, a lot of it is re-housing homeless people, that's a real job. I play make-believe and dressing up for a living!

If you go into acting to make money then you're an idiot. It's my hobby and the fact that I'm doing my hobby for a job is mental.

It's not often that you get to read something that just feels very original for a star but also something that feels like it's more than just a movie or entertainment. Even though the riots were one of the most pivotal riots in civil rights history, especially for the LGBT community, I knew surprisingly very little about them. You don't learn about Stonewall in schools. It's a bit gross really! So it certainly felt like something that was quite important.

When I was growing up, there was a man who gave me lessons and things. I'm very dyslexic so he used to give me extra reading and writing. And he always knew that I was interested in stuff but he never told me that he was in the Second World War himself. One day he gave me his helmet that he had worn through the North Africa Campaign. It was just before he died. So I've got his helmet. That was pretty special to me.

What I've realized is that all of these people are so successful because they love what they do and they work exceptionally hard. No one gets successful in this business by fluke really. There are probably a couple of exceptions but most people just work so hard. They are working every day and they are doing their prep.