With action in Hollywood, a choreographer will be hired to design an amazing fight, with all these cool little narrative bits, such as a fighter having to perform a certain move because he's been injured and can only move that way, but it can all get lost in translation because the director then does what he wants with it and then passes it on to the editor, who does his interpretation of the fight. It becomes almost like Chinese whispers, so sometimes the end fight you see on film is so different to how it was conceived and looked on the day.

As an actor, it's all about whether you can sell the emotion on your face... that desperation, the panic and rage that comes with combat. The emotion of combat is important to me. I mean, you feel almost sick if you see a real fight where someone is getting badly beaten up. You can get emotionally involved in combat that has nothing to do with you in real-life, let alone if you are actually in it... or it's someone you know, and so you should have those same feelings on film.

Even when you spar for real and fight with full contact in training, you get hurt or you hurt someone and you see them trying to fight back. I want to inject as much reality as possible into fight scenes, even if some of the moves are slightly larger than life, if the emotion is there you'll then still be able to buy it. I recall seeing some films where people perform an acrobatic flip mid-fight and land with graceful precision and it's almost like watching Zorro... it's almost whimsical but you're no longer engaged.

A lot of fans are complaining nowadays of too much shaky cam in action scenes and not being able to see what is going on, but I don't want to disappoint people. I'm a huge admirer of action and I'm very passionate about it. I do believe that a lot of action could be done so much better in general, so I'm a real advocator for pushing things forward in that sense and giving the fans what they want.

Whenever you get game adaptations, it strikes me that it's always the gamers who get mugged because they try and make it for everyone else first and the actual gamers last.

In films, people sometimes forget and concentrate on the fight itself, which is great, but the 15 minutes that come beforehand are equally as breathtaking.

With action in Hollywood, a choreographer will be hired to design an amazing fight, with all these cool little narrative bits, such as a fighter having to perform a certain move because he's been injured and can only move that way, but it can all get lost in translation because the director then does what he wants with it and then passes it on to the editor, who does his interpretation of the fight. It becomes almost like Chinese whispers, so sometimes the end fight you see on film is so different to how it was conceived and looked on the day.