The number of people my age, younger now, a whole generation younger, who are fiercely bright, over-educated, under-employed and who are politicised and purposeless really upsets me. It's soul-destroying.

When you start getting jobs, and see your mates from drama school, you don't really want to talk about it, because you have this innate sense of guilt that it's not fair that others aren't doing exactly what you're doing. I do have that.

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

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

'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 love theatre, and you learn too much as an actor and enjoy too much of it not to want to go back a lot.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

Any privacy in public is a hard thing to negotiate.

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.'

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.

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!

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!

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.

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

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

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