'How do you balance the creative with the biblical?' One could pick up the scripture and read it to oneself and you would be communing directly with that information. As soon as you go into film, as soon as there's a camera, and there's an angle, and there's lighting, and there's editing, you're into the adaptation.

I fall in love with contradictions without understanding. I can't really portray them unless I do. So in a roundabout way I have to fall in love, it's my duty. If love is about understanding and understanding is compassion and compassion is love, I have to have compassion towards the world.

I don't know what my limitations are until I reach them. I look for the challenge.

A large part of how an actor works and their process is the stimulation of what's around you, and none more so than in a period piece. This is a modern piece, as much as it is set in a different time, age and myth. If it wasn't relevant, it wouldn't have been made and we wouldn't be putting our energy into it. It's relevant for us today because, in some ways, it throws up a mirror to all of us. As an actor, you get stimulus and you're effected by that, whether it's costumes or funny beards or castles.

I think everything I do is my early work. I can't wait to get on to the later stuff.

I also wanted to have fun with it. I wanted to have the scope, which I felt Merlin has, in his Machiavellian bi-polar way. He's not to be trusted, yet he is fighting for this great power and is really a master, to some degree, in orchestrating Camelot and King Arthur. He's a strange, dark devious character, and I just wanted to have fun, and get away from the cloak and long beard and pointy hat.

But it's a strange thing when people judge you because you're not doing some big Hollywood film. Are you suggesting I should be in The Dukes of Hazzard? I mean, hello?