I read more and more and I came across this character, Caroline Weldon. Sometimes in history, you find these people that no one would dare create. They're too mad.

When you're watching, I find two things happen. You either watch a film and it's really good and then you think, "Why can't I do that?" Or you watch a film and it's not good, and you think, "Why am I doing this?" So either way, it feels like being at work.

I've realized that the only thing I'm interested in is the performance. If the performance is right, then I'm happy. You offer up the dialogue and then the performance comes around.

I'm very bad at watching anything. I'm bad at going to theaters; I can't watch my own stuff; I watch a lot of sports.

With FX in particular, they've been fantastic and were really hands off. I mean, it helps that you've got Ridley Scott on your side.

I visited the set [of Allied] a few times, and it was a great set to visit. A lot of it was in West London, in an old Gillette factory. You'd go into the factory through the security, and then there were a lot of camels and goats. Most sets are really dull, but this was fantastic.

What happened was I was invited to meet Tom [Hardy] to discuss a project that he had in his mind about an adventurer who returns to England from Africa with secrets and with a history, and the original idea was set some 80 years later than it is now. But in the conversation I really took to the idea and I'd wanted for a while to set something in 1830 and 1840 in London, so it struck a chord.