Whoever wrote Shakespeare is a working class hero be he an aristocrat or a peasant. Shakespeare is a great leveler. We're presented with kings, queens, emperors and giants who feel the same things as everyone else: jealousy, love, anger, bitterness, grief, loss.

We're both Welshmen and growing up, when Howard Marks was finally caught, it was all over the news. He did an interview in the Welsh language, which I also speak, and I was sort of just amazed that this man from a small country was for many years supplying much of the world with most of the marijuana it was smoking. It was incredible.

The joy of a period film is that you're taken to another world. The costumes determine the way you move, and then consequently the way you breathe. And then, the way you breathe effects the way you think.

Whoever wrote Shakespeare is a working class hero be he an aristocrat or a peasant. Shakespeare is a great leveler. We're presented with kings, queens, emperors and giants who feel the same things as everyone else: jealousy, love, anger, bitterness, grief, loss.

My work is my way of expressing myself without being arrested.

When Howard Marks came out of prison, years later, I met him at a concert in South Wales; I was a young whippersnapper and Howard was kind of an outlaw hero. I said to him - and it's on tape, a cousin of his filmed our meeting - I said, "If you write a book, I want to play you in a movie." He said, "Let's shake on it," and we did. Thirteen years later, there we were, making the movie.

But in reading Shakespeare and in reading about Edward de Vere, it's quite apparent that when you read these works that whoever penned this body of work was firstly well-travelled, secondly a multi-linguist and thirdly someone who had an innate knowledge of the inner workings and the mechanisms of a very secret and paranoid Elizabethan court. Edward de Vere ticks those three boxes and many more. William of Stratford gave his wife a bed when he died [his second best bed].