You just have to open the newspapers in most Western news to see real violence.

For me, because I've had classical theater training, when people say, "Oh, my god, the play is amazing!," I'll never get to see it because I'm in it.

It is a tough business but if you get yourself in a situation like I, you can maintain a career over many years. That, to me, is a successful actor.

I like bringing little subtle complexities to a character. It's all about the subtext. No one can really describe or fully know another human being, even if they get a hook on them. It's more about instinctively knowing whether you like somebody or not.

The way Shakespeare wrote Fallstaff is with a heightened language and everything.

The way Shakespeare wrote Fallstaff is with a heightened language and everything. That's the genuis of having Ken Branagh here as well. Shakespeare doesn't require you to have a doctorate in his language or whatever to understand him. It just has to be directed and played right. It's all about scale and presence and getting these huge, epic stories across.

As an actor, I relish and delight in doing things that I'm not necessarily the demographic for. This is a demographic that is touching the psyche of a certain age group, facing the real internal questions of people who are going through rites of passage into adulthood. It's earth-shaking stuff.