You can either hope and pray you don't get picked on, or you can, in a way, almost make yourself a bigger target, because it's harder to bully something that's really big. It's easy to bully something that's small and frail.

I want to act, I want to write, and I need to follow good directors.

It's a strange thing, this idea that for some reason, if a lot of people like what you're doing, it's therefore not very good. We use the phrase that a band have 'sold out.' Just so you know, if you're doing a gig and you sell all your tickets, that is a brilliant thing to do.

I went through a stage of wearing quite lairy trainers. I had all these trainers in gold or pink or silver. I look at them now in the cupboard - what was I thinking? Such an awful idea.

The truth of why I used to listen to Arrested Development on my Walkman was because if I didn't, it would take me 20 minutes to walk to school. If I did, it took me 15. That's the reason I loved it. I just had more of a kick in my step, more of a bounce, so I'd walk quicker.

On stage, you have to have incredible confidence, or you would stop doing it. But I don't think I will ever get to the point where I go, 'I know exactly what I am doing,' and I don't think I want to.

I think everyone at school experiences some form of bullying. With kids at school, it can be anything - it can be your shoes or the wrong bag or anything. If you are big like I am, you are always going to be a target. So I decided at school to make myself an even bigger target, if you like: to make myself as big as I could be.

I knew acting was what I wanted to do. I don't know if I was brilliant at it, but when I was doing school plays, I loved it so much I didn't want it to end. I feel like I'm exactly the same as when I was doing plays at school, to be honest.

I haven't always voted for the same party, mostly because I find that strange. One thing I've never quite understood is when people say 'I'm a Conservative' or 'I'm Labour,' before even hearing what the person running stands for or wants to change.

It's a tough one for me, politics. I grew up in a house where my father is a Christian book salesman and a Tory, and my mum's a social worker. So I can always see the benefits of both arguments.

I'm very proud of 'Gavin and Stacey,' but I think I have to write something else even to start to consider myself a writer. Just because you do something once, it doesn't mean that's who you are. I played football last night; it doesn't mean I'm a footballer.

I was always the kid at school who thought it was a good idea to set off the fire alarm. And much as I'm aware that that's a trait which also propels other things which are good, I wish I could just pause and go, 'Is this really what you want to do?'

This arrogance thing... I've had that my whole life. I flip between, 'Oh really? Oh, thank you. Wow. That's amazing' and, 'Yeah! Of course I am.' They're both varying degrees of a self-defence mechanism. It can be from minute to minute that I change.

When the 'Guardian' is commissioning writers to write obituary pieces about you and your career... it doesn't get much nastier than that. And you've just got to go, 'It doesn't actually matter.'

There's a difference between wanting to appear confident and actually feeling confident. I think there have been many times when I've overcompensated for how nervous or out of place I feel. I was like that at school.

No one could have predicted on day one of rehearsals, that a year and a half later we would have shot a film and all be living in New York. It was surreal.

No boys liked Take That, and it was weird if you did because they danced around and wore matching clothes. But I didn't grow up with a dad who told me something was manly or not manly.

Nobody tells you when success comes around; in its transient way, you're just working and exhausted all the time. Sometimes I think I'm just sleeping in the back of cars, d'you know what I mean?

I guess I have a faith. I have an overriding feeling that all of this can't be for nothing. But then I also fully understand that it might be.

Oh my God, I never really tweet, but there's a moment every day I write one and then delete it.

You used to have to come to America for 18 months and drive around in a van, trying to get radio stations to play your song. But I remember One Direction's manager telling me that the first time they came to America, they hadn't released a song - they'd only been on 'The X Factor.' But there were 2,000 fans waiting at LAX airport.

There's nothing nicer than getting a round of applause for turning up for work. It's amazing! You start work, and people clap. Do you know what I mean? And then they stand up and clap at the end.

BBC3 even started their biggest shows, like Jack Whitehall's 'Bad Education,' they premiered on the iPlayer a week before it went on TV. I think it should always be at the forefront of what is fresh and exciting, and therefore it should be the first channel to exist online.

Louis Tomlinson, who is a member of One Direction, his mum was a chaperone on 'Fat Friends.' So Louis used to come to the set with his mum, and since I was the only sort of young person around, we would kick a football around, things like that.