There are movies where I've walked onto the set and felt, "This is home," and I'm confident in myself and my work, but that was my first experience of live TV. At that stage, Friends was at its unassailable height of popularity and brilliance.

I wanted to play a TV detective because it's a rite of passage; I wanted to experience every area of acting. I haven't done comedy or as much Shakespeare as I had intended.

I think it's quite lucky that I lead this lifestyle, and in fact, my career's only gotten better as I've looked older, because it ages you, the uncertainty.

Family holidays and weekends are really brightly colored memories, full of my mother and father, rather than our nannies and au pairs.

I'm 5'9" and have the body of an English person that doesn't know how to diet.

I was lucky, because Ewan McGregor had already been shooting with Roman Polanski for about a month before I got role. And he did a faultless impersonation of what it was going to be like. So when direction happened, it was like, "Oh yeah. That's what Ewan said was going to happen." And so it was a little bit less debilitating than it might have been.

If the role is right and it's another situation of having a benevolent genius at the head of it, someone who likes actors, and will protect the actors from the ravages of reality-TV drama. It's a brutal world, and you need to have a strong creative team who can stand up to the network.