I love stories – devising them, writing them, reading them, watching them, being a part of them.

I’d like to be an inventor, as they look at the world in a different way and find solutions for making it better.

Being an actor, you can get spoilt a little bit: car services come and pick you up, you get put up in nice hotels, people fetch you coffee, and so on. It is wonderful, but...

We live in such a consumer-based world. Everything we do, someone else has provided for us, so there is something really empowering about knowing that once I have found the right pieces of wood, I...

People abusing their power makes me see red.

I didn’t have the money to put myself through drama school, so I thought – naively – that if I wrote a play and put it on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, agents would see...

I think people are always going to be fascinated about the haves and have nots – about the divide between the servants and the rich families upstairs.

As an artist, you want to make good stories and create good art; as a businessman, you want to make money and make sure the investors are happy. The two will always clash, unfortunately.

I’ve played a lot of villains. The villains are always fun because you can just go fractionally bigger than life. It’s always a grey area because you don’t want to end up mustache-twirling and making...

For my 23rd birthday, I received a nylon string guitar. I told myself that if I could play Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears In Heaven,’ then I could play the guitar. I practised every chance I got,...

The women in ‘Downton Abbey’ don’t compare to the women in ‘Upstairs Downstairs.’ Ours are stunning. We’ve got Laura Haddock, Keeley Hawes, Claire Foy… beautiful women.

When I was eight, my mum found me humming to myself and scribbling on a scrap of paper. When she asked me what I was doing, I got shy. I was writing a Christmas song,...

When I was a young kid, the best stuff on television was always the BBC period dramas – it was what we sat down as a family to watch and what people talked about and...

It’s funny – when I first started as an actor, obviously there were long periods of being idle and all you want to do is work. So if I ever get the compulsion to feel...