I think it's OK to play to your strengths, and if I have a quality of Englishness that people like, I won't hide that. I'm probably not going to play a junkie and that's OK because there are other people who will do it better. A view that's been held for a long time is that the best way to prove oneself as an actor is to play the grittiest roles out there. I don't agree with that.

As a woman, you feel that you shouldnt want to better yourself against others. Ambition has become such an ugly word, hasnt it?

The job of an actor is the same in all of them, really. I mean, you're just creating a character that you hope people will believe, so it doesn't make that much of a difference really.

I know I’ve got loads that has never been tapped.

Nothing can teach you what it's like to work on a film set, and the best education there can be for an actor is to walk up the street and observe human nature.

I realized that many men are happy to play a supporting role to another man, but they are much less happy to play a supporting role to a woman. People are saying we need more females in our industry and we need more female-driven stories, but that takes the men of bankable star quality to come forward and play supporting roles in those films, because ultimately that's what the women have always done. We've always lent our name value to male-centric stories, and now we're going to have to ask the men to swallow their pride, because it seems that it's about pride.

I think actors have to have clear goals in term of fitness, I think it is very important. I did yoga very seriously and I think that is a wonderful exercise. I take tennis lessons, and I swim a lot.