We're all used to seeing a lot of cop shows, some of them brilliant, some of them very generic.

There's a really sweet spot with acting where you've finished a job, and you've got another one coming up in three or four months' time. That's my favourite period of unemployment.

When I'm not working, as a family we are obsessed with jumping off rocks into the sea and doing dangerous things.

It can be tough to turn things down, but as an actor, being in demand is a nice problem to have.

When you're a kid, you imagine acting to be singing and fighting and like the movies. Then you become an actor and get the reality, which is often a lot more mundane. But sometimes it's really nice to run around with guns saving the world.

I find the whole ceremony of marriage a bit like going to work. Putting on a lovely dress and make-up, learning lines, someone doing your hair.

My make-up call as Cassie on 'Unforgotten' is 45 minutes, and on 'The Split', it's considerably longer. They have to do your hair and your make-up. On 'Unforgotten,' I'm in and out, and I don't have to worry about how I sit for the whole day so as not to crease the clothes.

The best thing my mum and dad did was to send me to the local youth theatre. I loved that; I felt I'd found the thing I really wanted to do.

Once you've sat in a room annoying Derek Jacobi while he's trying to do his crossword, you're prepped for working with the greats.

There aren't many shows that encompass roles for a seven-year-old to someone in their 50s.

I wish someone had got hold of me and said, 'You know, children are really good fun. You will have a fantastic time, and you will still work.'

Once I was asked to do celebrity rowing, where they taught people who had been to Oxford or Cambridge to row against each other. That sounded like too much hard work: really early mornings and having to be quite fit, which I'm not.

When you're both actors, it is feast or famine financially and emotionally in your marriage.

I could never be anyone I've played. I am so not a detective; I can barely get 200 yards from A to B with the help of Google maps, and I am just about the least observant person on the planet, so I never notice what people look like or how they walk or if they're committing a crime in broad daylight.

I noticed that, on 'Spooks,' there were a lot of women behind the camera and in different departments.

Derek Jacobi is probably our finest actor.

People very rarely know my real name but recognise me as characters from my shows, such as 'Last Tango In Halifax.'

When the acting all dries up, I won't be going there - either to the police force or to the church. I'll have to think of something else!

I am not a morning person.

Every interview I've done since I've turned 40, the journalist will say, 'So, isn't it amazing? Your career should be over, but you're still working. Why do you think you have found a career at a time when a lot of women are slowing down?'

'Spooks' was unique. It took up such a lot of your life - I think we did 10 episodes for the first few seasons. That's six months of your life.

My husband is an actor, and we don't talk about acting at home.

'Collateral' poses lots of questions and does it within the format of a really good, tense thriller. It starts at a real pace, and it doesn't let go.

I come from a family of scrap metal dealers, so becoming an actor seemed like a ridiculous thing to do, but I'd found the thing that gave me a kick, and I quickly became obsessed with it.