I love TV and I love making films and I love doing plays. I feel very lucky to be able to do all three.

I'd auditioned for the National Youth Theatre and I didn't get a place and it was terrifying.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.

You never know how films are going to do and it is daunting if I think about it.

I did four or five years in telly, and by the end of it was drained. I was a bit sick of myself. I didn't feel like an actor anymore. That sounds silly, but when you're doing a play you're using different muscles, and it blew all the cobwebs away.

There's always a concern as an actor that you'll be boring unless your character is swinging from a chandelier.

The security comes, as an actor, in knowing that you're not in control. If you try to control your career, or how people perceive you, you'll make yourself unhappy, because life doesn't work like that. So much is luck. It's much better to let yourself off, to think, 'There's nothing I can do.'