I think the East India Company represents what we would think of as a very modern approach to the world where everything was counted, every penny was counted.

The story of James Delaney is also someone who very deliberately presents himself as an individual and plays nations against each other, plays the East India against the Crown, all of those sort of overwhelming concepts that ran the world at the time.

True stories are always good because they're so odd, and so unlikely.

I relish the eight-hour format of a single season because it gives you time to do that.

East India Company weren't an evil organization that went around deliberately oppressing people, but they were driven by profit, and how familiar is that now?

I love cooking and kitchens.It's just a great world, and I wanted to explore it. You see the façade, the outside, the public part, and then you just walk through one door marked "Staff Only" and you're in a different universe.

There was an unbelievable amount of animosity in that war [for America Independence] which people have forgotten, which was still around 50 years later.