I hadn't read or heard a lot about [Tom] Wolfe until I read this script, and in that way I think it was really clever to write a piece about him instead of Max Perkins,[Ernest] Hemingway, [John] Fitzgerald, or others that people have strong opinions of already.

A job is not just a job. It’s who you are.

I honestly have no interest in celebrity whatsoever. If anything, I always cringe at it because it takes away from what I am, which is an actor who wants to be better and do better things.

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.'

In a weird way, it’s kind of a relief to think, ‘Oh, I know I’m not that young sort of pretty thing anymore.’ It’s quite nice talking about what it was like to be the young pretty thing, rather than being it.

If you want to change who you are, you have to change what you do.

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.