I'm not Tom Cruise. Very few British actors are. If you look at the body of work I've done it's pretty obvious I'm not going to make a 'Mission: Impossible.'

London is my home... I know what's right and wrong here, and it's nice to have somewhere familiar to go back to.

I sometimes shy away because I don't want to be too 'showy-offy' but the older I get I think, 'You have a handkerchief, put it in your pocket.'

I'm keen to do as little or as much reading and watching as the director may advise, and often off that you kind of stem into other things that you find of influence, perhaps the things that you're watching. It's a good excuse to get to know a new profession, or a new approach, or a new era. It's about authenticity. It's about having the confidence to really feel that you're saturated and know the world you're about to step into and understand the person you're about to be.

Personally speaking there's only so long you can go from film to film to film. There's an inspiration an actor gets from the stage.

It's interesting to see how people bring different things to them. I think it comes down to the universal appeal of the Holmes-Watson that they can keep being discovered in different ways.

You can compare Holmes and Watson to great Shakespearean characters, in a way. They've been played by hundreds of actors over the years, and each one is a different interpretation - the source material can take that form of interpretation.