I love doing impersonations of people.

One of the fears of having too much work is not having time to observe. And once you get recognised, there is nowhere for you to look any more. You can't sit on a night bus and watch it all happen.

Having your adolescence at an all-male boarding school is just crap.

I've been quite a late developer on the clothes front, but I've suddenly realised it is one of life's joys.

I'm a Prince of Wales Trust ambassador, so I'm all about giving youth an education, a voice and a chance to not take the wrong road.

Maybe it's because I was an only child, but I've always wanted kids.

I've realised now that the reality of children is you have to be in the right place with the right person.

I'm not loyal to one genre. I want to mix it up.

I've always wanted to play a spy, because it is the ultimate acting exercise. You are never what you seem.

I was brought up in a world of privilege.

Being a posh actor in England you cannot escape the class-typing from whatever side you look at it.

We all want to escape our circumstances, don't we? Especially if you are an actor.

The further you get away from yourself, the more challenging it is. Not to be in your comfort zone is great fun.

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.

My mum and dad had worked incredibly hard to afford me an education.

I had the privilege of being able to choose, or at least have the opportunity to work at, being anything but an actor.

I drag a lot of stuff round with me that I don't need.

I drive a motorbike, so there is the whiff of the grim reaper round every corner, especially in London.

Lines are very difficult to learn.

I have actual acting scars.

Pull the hair on my head the wrong way, and I would be on my knees begging for mercy. I have very sensitive follicles.

If you have an over-preoccupation with perception and trying to please people's expectations, then you can go mad.

I was thrilled with how the first series of 'Sherlock' was received. It was such great fun to film, which makes it so rewarding when something you enjoy is so well received.

I want to be able to play trailer-bound fatties in a Judd Apatow comedy.

We're living through a time where we are fighting wars fostered by politics, admittedly not on the same scale as the First World War, but with equally tragic realities for our soldiers and their families.

'Frankenstein' was all about the idea that, through electricity and the destruction of night, man creating light and darkness, we took on god-like powers and then abused them like gods, and we are only men. That's a story about man making a man in his own image. The inversion of natural order.

My own grandfathers were a submarine commander and a 'desert rats' tank operator in the Second World War.

Someone will always hate what I say. There's always going to be somebody spitting blood about my wooden-faced, toffee-named, crappy acting.

Talking about class terrifies me. There is no way of winning.

One of the best things about being an actor is that it's a meritocracy.

Upper class to me means you are either born into wealth or you're Royalty.

When you're a kid, 'Star Trek' is a slower burn. It's funny, it's entertaining, but it also has a maturity about it - which is its universal appeal, I think.

I got live tweeted once by someone who was opposite my home in some rented accommodation. He was actually describing on twitter what I was doing. 'I took a shirt off, I went to the window, I put a shirt back on... ' And I've got blinds in my flat!

If people ask, 'Are you Sherlock Holmes?', it's horribly naff, but I say, 'I'm not, I just look a bit like him' - which is how I feel. There are bad attributes of his that I really don't share!

Our daily lives are so mundane, we get taken over by what is immediately in front of us and we don't see beyond that.

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.'

Any privacy in public is a hard thing to negotiate.

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.

Do awards change careers? Well, I haven't heard of many stories where that's the case. It's a fun excuse to meet colleagues and celebrate people who've done well that year in certain people's eyes, and it's nothing more than that.

I'll always do 'Sherlock' - it's something I'm not going to give up on.

When you see a good horseman, you're unable to tell where the instruction is coming from. It's like telepathy.

I was happy as an only child, but I've always wanted to be part of a bigger family.

Do I like being thought of as attractive? I don't know anyone on Earth who doesn't, but I do find it funny.

I'm not confident in social situations; just going up to someone in a bar and saying 'Hi' is going to be even more difficult because they won't know the real me. They will just know me as a fictional person I play on the screen.

Mum did a lot of commercial theatre and farces in the 1980s and '90s to make sure the school bills were paid.

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.

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.

'Sherlock' fans are, by and large, an intelligent breed, so they've gone through my back catalogue and got what I've done, why and how I've done it. There is some obsessive behaviour, but I worry for them rather than me.

I wasn't born into land or titles, or new money, or an oil rig.

Fame is a weird one. You need to distance yourself from it. People see a value in you that you don't see yourself.