It's very rare to get a film script that has good dialogue. A lot of the time, you spend on film sets really fighting to find out how to say the words.

You bring yourself to every role, it doesn't matter who it is, it doesn't matter if it's a mass murderer, you can bring something to it.

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.

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

I made a conscious decision to live my life the best way I could and that meant to publicise myself as little as possible.

I always find it much easier when there's one person whose vision you're following, as opposed to many people.

You live with a writer [a mother], and you grow up with their words, their kind of fantasies, and I'd pretty much seen every single one of her plays, and been in a lot of rehearsal rooms, so it felt very natural and easy. It was lovely to get an opportunity to do that professionally as well.