I remember a conversation with my parents about who the people on the TV were, and learning they were actors and they acted out this story and just thinking that was the most fantastic notion, and that's what I want to do.

I mean, you know, while I’m acting on stage I’m ranking quite high, but in a room with Barack Obama I’m probably into negative digits. I never feel very famous...

I don’t want to go.

I think doing different accents is part of the job of acting really. It’s something else that I quite enjoy the challenge of, to be honest.

If you speak in a different accent, you begin to move in a slightly different way. You think in a slightly different way. I think it’s part of trying to find what makes a character.

When you’re playing a real person there’s a balance between playing the person in the script and playing the person as he was in life. You have to be respectful and true to who that person was, but at the same time tell the story in the film.

And the very fact of how you speak somehow influences who you are. The way you move, the way you think, it seeps into your being, and it’s quite hard to really break that down entirely.

To have someone who’s got a strong individual voice that is allowed to be heard is quite increasingly rare. These people need to be cherished.

It has to be said that the bad guys are often more interesting than the good guys because you get to indulge part of your nature that hopefully gets subsumed most of the time. But I just like playing interesting characters, and variety’s the spice of that, as it is with life, I suppose.

Twitter! It’s like being stalked by committee!