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 don't want to make vast generalizations about people who go into legal professions, but there are similarities in the barristers that I met and interacted with, in the sense that they tend to be highly eloquent, highly analytical, thinking people who have a very rapid-fire think-before-they-speak button, as it were.

If pressed, I would say I feel British. It's where I grew up and where I choose to live, the culture that I love, but I feel perfectly at home in America, I don't feel like a tourist or anything.

I daydream about things I want to happen, but none of it is more complicated, most of the time, than just really hoping that the good parts and the well-written parts are the ones that turn up on my doorstep.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be an actor. It has just always been an inevitability on some level.

I suppose the reason why I like acting is because I'm curious about human nature, and the less I know about a character on the page, instinctively, in a way, the better.

Sometimes I can spend months doing things to make sure that my instincts work correctly, but ultimately it's still instinctive.