It's good to know that other people think differently, and that's what makes the characters interesting.

I think sometimes it's sort of easier to be playing a role based on a real person because there's quite often a lot more information, you're not making it up, it's there in books, it's there in research form. But really the questions you ask about the character, and why people behave, and where they come, and how they've ended up in the places they've ended up are the same.

I'm ... incredibly open with my mates. Or even people I just meet.

If I don't do this film. I'll be acting in corsets for the next 20 years.

I love costume dramas, I love performing in them, because in a funny kind of way, you feel more free. You know about the period, you can read the books, you can see the paintings, but you've never actually going to know what it was like. You can kind of stretch those boundaries a bit.

I wasn't allowed to do commercials. I wasn't allowed to do TV series. I wasn't allowed to do soaps or basically anything that would mean I missed too much school.

Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.