I think it's a bigger risk following a part that plays up your looks than it is to try and carve out a career as an actor.

I'm a massive comic book fan. I was buying weekly installments of "The Watchmen", and "From Hell", and "Parallax" and "Johnny Nemo". I was a huge comic book fan as a kid and I still am. Me and my youngest son are both comic book nerds together; make models and stuff.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.'