I've always played music and I've always been in bands and there have been periods in my life where the music has taken a much more front row seat than any acting. For a big period of time the acting work was really a way of raising money to fund my music. And then that all sort of changed around and that's fine.

It’s always interesting to me to tell stories that come from difficult political climates.

When you're acting, everything is there around you, you just have to believe that it's real. When you're standing there with a slightly grey wig on and you have a baby in your arms screaming in your ear, you can go: "Well, I guess this is what it's like!"

Definitely River Phoenix is somebody that I thought, "This guy is very cool." I wanted to be like him when I was a kid.

I can play the guitar and the keys and the drums. I'm not brilliant at any of them. I can sing too. Some of my friends are proper musicians but I'm a song-writer. I write songs.

You could pick another two people and you'd have a whole other story and that's why films about love get made and made and made - because there's a million ways to tell it and no two stories are the same.

I moved to Manchester to join a band and ended up getting into acting, and I moved back to London to become an actor and ended up joining a band.