My own grandfathers were a submarine commander and a ‘desert rats’ tank operator in the Second World War.
I haven’t done period dramas back-to-back, or really anything back-to-back. You get asked to do what you’re most recently famed for, so I’m careful of not repeating myself.
The more charming person is the person who admits the other person is more charming.
I’ve been quite a late developer on the clothes front, but I’ve suddenly realised it is one of life’s joys.
I’ve always wanted to play a spy, because it is the ultimate acting exercise. You are never what you seem.
I’ll always do ‘Sherlock’ – it’s something I’m not going to give up on.
Any privacy in public is a hard thing to negotiate.
All the backstories are there but not talked about.
I don’t live beyond my means. I enjoy luxury and I enjoy the privilege of it, when I can afford it, and I’m in the situation where it’s been given to me, but I’m very conscious of what is wasteful.
Every job is incredibly different, and I love it because you’re picking up skill sets and experiences. It’s the university of life.
Having your adolescence at an all-male boarding school is just crap.
Maybe it’s because I was an only child, but I’ve always wanted kids.
I want to do it all. I want to climb mountains, go through jungles, fight wars in space, get the girl, shoot the bad-guy full of lead, have all the zippy one liners, bulge muscles out of a singlet, drip sweat and blood on screen, all of that.
If I’d had fame early on, I’d have been able to abuse it in the way that a young man should.
I love theatre, and you learn too much as an actor and enjoy too much of it not to want to go back a lot.
I want to be able to play trailer-bound fatties in a Judd Apatow comedy.
Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.
Do I like being thought of as attractive? I don’t know anyone on Earth who doesn’t, but I do find it funny.
There’s a huge raft of roles that actors in our culture perform, and you can see any one of about three Hamlets in a year. It’s not something to be completely daunted by.
It’d be really nice to wake up looking like, I don’t know, Jake Gyllenhaal and think, ‘Let’s try this on for a day and see how it feels.’
I realised quite early on that, although I wasn’t trying to make a career speciality of it, I was playing slightly asexual, sociopathic intellectuals.