As an actor, you ask yourself what you can do to put yourself in a position where you can play that role.

The space and light up there in Norfolk is wonderfully peaceful. I find myself doing funny things like gardening, and cooking, which I rarely do in London.

I was born in 1961. Now I think the 16 years that elapsed between 1961 and the end of the wars is nothing. To a child growing up it felt like an eternity, an entirely different world.

As an actor, you ask yourself what you can do to put yourself in a position where you can play that role.

I'd always liked the idea that drama acts at its best as a kind of arena for debate, not just about the thing itself, but also producing aesthetic, stylistic, political and moral discussions. The Jungian view would be that it affects all of our imaginations and somehow taps into our hidden, ancient, primordial memories.

People will say that it's some kind of evasion, but I would never want to have a kid for me. I'd want to have the child for the child's sake, if that makes sense.

I'm just a hired actor who was hired for a particular job, but I think one of the joys of reading the script was the way that the personal and the global are woven together.