The more charming person is the person who admits the other person is more charming.
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.
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.