Whenever I'm in theatre situations I will go out of my way not to talk about my father, but in the film world I can be really proud of my family and say, 'You know what: my dad's a really, really famous theatre director,' because nobody has any idea.

I always look for contradiction in a character.

I've played an awful lot of repressed people.

I love film acting - I'm not snobby about it. I don't think that theater acting's a more noble profession. I think they're both very important. I love both. And in my dream world, I'd get to do both forever.

I try and avoid thinking of strategy and I tend to stick to my gun of doing things that I like and try to avoid things that I "should" be doing, and stay true to that.

Sometimes you can incubate a character and that can take me a month just sitting on it imagining it, doing everything from sketching it to taking long walks, but sometimes you can see the character immediately. A lot of it is instinctive.

I read everything. I've always got a book on the go and I'm really nerdy about it, I get through books and don't remember anything about them afterwards. But I read all sorts, from classic to contemporary.