Everythings a choice. Nobody's born good. Nobody's born evil. It's always a choice.

All acting is an act of imagination. You are simply conjuring up imaginary circumstances in your mind and responding truthfully to them.

I would always play the baddie, incidentally.

What le Carré is so good at is unpicking something very specific about Englishness. That is almost part of why I think he wrote the novel. You can feel le Carré's anger that someone who has had the benefits of an English education and an English upbringing is using that privilege to basically do the worst things imaginable. There is an anger in the book about that.

Sometimes love really is just that simple.

My father and I used to tussle about me becoming an actor. He's from strong, Presbyterian Scottish working-class stock, and he used to sit me down and say, 'You know, 99 percent of actors are out of work. You've been educated, so why do you want to spend your life pretending to be someone else when you could be your own man?'

Life is generally pretty damn amazing if you let it be.