Often jobs are un-turndownable even before you read the script. You go, 'Well, I have to do that.'

The script for 'Infamous' was so poised between tragedy and comedy. It's a dream part. One reads those scripts with a sense of melancholia. When you read a script that good... I remember thinking, 'Oh, this script is too good. They'll never give it to me.'

I was a fan of Hitchcock, but more importantly than that, he is such an inscrutable man, and a very carefully inscrutable man. He apparently was blank-faced with a calm and controlled presence. I was immediately anxious and thought, ‘How am I going to get behind that?’

There are far more good actors than there are jobs for them, so it’s a big question of luck.

It’s hard for it to make a mark in this city because London has so much culture to offer.

But I think the children of actors share a certain pragmatic approach. One is denied some of that ‘running away with the circus’ element of being an actor.

There is this miraculous thing I heard Hugh Grant talking about – the thing about screen acting is that you can read people’s thoughts. You are trying to register something inside and usually the eyes in cinema are where you will register that.

I’ve got to tell you, I’ve played real characters before and people always bring up this word ‘impersonation,’ and I’m never entirely sure what it means.

I still don’t feel I know Hitchcock at all. I find that the more one looks, the more elusive he becomes. But my admiration for Hitchcock the filmmaker remains undiminished. He is a giant of the cinema and the darkness in him informs his cinematic language. You can’t separate one from the other.

I often get sent scripts about little men in big situations. There’s a comic element to it, which is forces stacked against this little guy, and how is he going to defeat them?