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When I was at drama school, I remember going to Amsterdam for new year and sitting with friends on the front of a P&O ferry in the wind, having some sort of 'Titanic' moment, declaring ourselves to be the new kings of theatre.
In my gap year between college and drama school, I taught art at a hospice and worked at a little coffee shop across the street from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London when everything around it was still a construction zone.
As a young girl, I was too intent on getting to London and drama school and out of east Yorkshire to think about winning Oscars. I did win a Bafta once, and was so unprepared for it I jabbered on for a minute - a minute too long.
My acting career began when I walked into a drama school class run by Anna Scher in Islington. Anna discovered a lot of people: Linda Robson, Pauline Quirke, Gary and Martin Kemp, and Dexter Fletcher were among my contemporaries.
Acting was a slow-burn thing. I found it was something I really, really liked doing, but it wasn't until my third year at drama school that I actually thought, 'Oh, right, I'm trained for this now; I'd better see if I can do it.'
When it comes to rugby, I'm a Welshman through and through. I'm a huge fan; I've played rugby since I was seven. Unfortunately, I had to quit when I went to drama school because it doesn't really go hand in had with being an actor.
What you don't get necessarily at drama school is a gigantic mix of people. At university, there's people from every social background, and you get to go through that period of being naive and not quite sure who you're going to be.
At drama school, I was told, 'Lay off the chips, or you'll never play Juliet.' Sometimes, in the stock room of the set of 'Dinnerladies,' I'd put away three or four Mars bars while waiting for a scene. Then, at 24, I lost five stone.
I tried to get into the National Youth Theatre and didn't, and I tried to get into drama school and didn't, and then I went to university and was really delighted that I went there. I think having the word 'no' can be quite creative.
I studied law, I got an alright degree, and then I was going to go and do something called an LPC, which is a Legal Practice Course, which qualifies you as a lawyer. But I didn't end up doing it, because I went to drama school instead.
When I was at drama school, I was totally broke, and a lot of my mates had jobs and were financially very good to me, so if, for example, I take them away on a trip to a football match in Europe, it means that I can pay them back a bit.
I left drama school to do 'The Book Thief' - it was a real trip going straight from school kind of right into it, but I feel like the momentum of being in school put me in a good mindset as far as going into it as a learning experience.
At the end of my first year, I realized I wanted to do more drama, so I actually started an extracurricular course outside of university. So I was at school all day writing, and in the evenings I'd go to drama school. So it was nonstop.
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.
I'd been wanting to work with James McAvoy since I was in drama school. I suppose there are parallels in that we're Scottish, we went to the same drama school and share the same agent, but aside from that, he's someone I've looked up to.
When I decided I wanted to go to drama school, I realized that a lot of the actors whose careers I really admire and whose work I really admire were English and English trained. I felt there was a real vocational feel to work in the U.K.
I wasn't one of the ones voted most likely to succeed when I was at drama school, but I persevered and concentrated on the acting rather than going to the right parties and getting the right agent. Eventually, after ten years, it paid off.
I couldn't afford to go to drama school in London. Then I met with the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, and I fell in love with the city. It was one of the few schools that offered me a place. It didn't do me any harm.
I've always said that with kids' TV that people get stuck in it from drama school but that's not fair because I know myself that when you go in creatively, kids are so much more open to ideas. You're so much freer to mess about and try things.
I think the point to be understood is that we're all different. I've never been a fan of theories of acting. I didn't go to drama school, so I was never put through a training that was limited by someone saying, 'This is the way you should act.'
But then I got a job selling coffee at the York Theatre, and when I met theatre people, something clicked. I felt comfortable with them; I felt like myself. I decided to go to drama school based just on that feeling. I had never done any acting.
I applied to drama school when I was about 18 and didn't have any luck anywhere. They basically turned me away and said I had a bit of growing up to do. I went back to Aberystwyth and did my growing up by spending eight months working in Peacocks.
I felt quite confident - when you come out of drama school you feel like you're on top of everything. I always tell people to go to drama school even if they've already done movies or whatever because the way you encounter content is so different.
There are lots of people in the world who do have the advantage of going to a good drama school and just decide that they want to be actors. There's nothing wrong with an untrained actor; they have to get their training somehow, they have to learn.
There was a point when I was very young where I remember talking with my mom about going to drama school and this was maybe when I was 8, 9, 10 years old - and she knew that I was also academically very capable, and she steered me in another direction.
I thought I wanted to go to drama school or university, and that would have been a completely different life. But what got me was the sound, and hearing it. Hearing everything so loud, I loved that back in the studio. I loved that from the very beginning.
I went to university in Leeds, and I graduated in 2016 and moved to London with the intention of applying to drama school. I was living at my friend's house; then, I was working as a live-in nanny for a couple of months because I had nowhere else to live.
Most actors here go to the West Coast; I ended up going to Ireland. My buddies who left drama school, they had this arrogance - 'We don't want to typecast ourselves.' But I said, 'I want to do Irish parts. That's the thing that's gonna give me the leg up.'
I wanted to go to drama school, but when I got the part in 'Falling,' I got an agent, so it seemed a good idea to work. I always did a lot of singing and dancing, so I am glad it worked out that way. I would like to study stage acting at some point, though.
I made a very concerted decision to go to drama school in the United States. But I did have the opportunity to go to Britain's Central School of Speech and Drama, and my dad and I had a few tense words about that. He wanted me to go to British drama school.
Orlando's a really cool guy. They hired him for 'Lord of the Rings' out of drama school. He's very new at this still and doesn't have a lot of experience. So we were in this together and we've tried to help each other out. We felt very equal which was good.
For me, it's all I've wanted to do. I did local plays and productions, local theater groups and anything that involved it. And then, I went and studied it, attended drama school and got my first lucky break in the theater in London, and just went from there.
My life changed in 2005 on the day I met my wife, Tamzin. She was in a play called 'Breathing Corpses' with James McAvoy, one of my best mates from drama school. I knew who she was, and I'd fancied her quite a bit when she played Melanie Owen in 'EastEnders.'
I went to NYU drama school, so I was a very serious actress. I used to do monologues with a Southern accent, and I was really into drama and drama school. And then, in my last year of drama school, I did a comedy show, and the show became a big hit on campus.
I was lucky to get into drama school and become a professional actor. No-one ever mentioned the colour of my skin. It's only when I came out of RADA - the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art - that I suddenly realised people started to refer to me as a black actor.
I didn't go to drama school or anything, and I learned on the job. And it's nice to have the chance to pretend to be other people. As a singer, though, I feel there's much more of me in that. I've written the songs, I'm singing them, I'm exposing my feelings.
I knew I wanted to be an actress, but I hadn't ever really told anyone. I'd always got quite good grades, so people assumed I would go and do a 'normal' job. My dad took me to my first audition for drama school and picked me up without anyone knowing, really.
It's a good time for me, but it's only recently I've become comfortable in my job. At the start, it's hard having the nerve to call yourself an actor, let alone doing it. I gave myself two years after drama school, and if I didn't make it, then I'd give it up.
I did martial arts since I was 10 years old, and I've got as much love for the movies as I have for martial arts, so when I was 18 years old, I started studying performing arts with the eye of getting into the film industry and went to drama school after that.
If you count my childhood appearances in a few TV shows and being the son of two well-known actor parents in the U.K., plus three years of drama school, you could say that I've been pretty much surrounded by the business of acting and performing my entire life.
I didn't start drama school until I was 20, and I don't think I would have gotten nearly as much out of it had I gone when I was 18. I didn't show up there to please anyone. After I was accepted, I wrote, 'The Audition's Over' and put it on the door of my dorm.
My favorite play in drama school was 'The Bacchae.' It's about a king who literally gets eaten alive by all the women in the play in a kind of orgy - it's related to the word 'bacchanal' - and I loved that idea of animalistic chaos and following our own desires.
I was hellbent on going to drama school, but my mother, rightly, panicked and persuaded me to go to university on the grounds that a degree would be 'something to fall back on.' Whilst at college, I realised I wasn't good enough or robust enough to be an actress.
When I decided that I might want to do acting for a living - I don't know where it really came from, since there was no school play or any of that - my mom gave me her blessing. I had to get a scholarship - that was the only way I could have gone to drama school.
I don't watch anything of mine much. I haven't gone to drama school, or college, either. I just like to watch other actors in action. I learned so much from working with De Niro. I'd be in a scene with him where I was supposed to be acting, and I was just watching.
In order to do 'Amores Perros,' I had to skip some time at drama school, so the director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu came up with a great Latin American solution, which was to say I had a tropical disease and had to stay in Mexico for a while. Everyone believed me.
When I was at drama school in the U.K., I was there for two and a half years, and we did one week of television and film. It's right before you leave. It's like, 'We've taught you Chekhov and Shakespeare; you are likely to be in a washing-up soap-liquid commercial.'
My first paying job was a in a production of Neil LaBute's 'Bash: Latter Day Plays' at the Union Street theater in Borough. I played the 'Medea Redux' character. That was my first job out of drama school. I can't remember how much I got paid. I'm sure it was pennies.
I trained as a singer before I was an actor. I was a kid singer, I went to theater and choir school, and then I got music scholarships throughout my education. And that's what I was going to do. And then I took a left turn and went to drama school and became an actor.
I did tap dancing and stuff like that at drama school. I did ballet as well. My dance teacher and I didn't necessarily get along all that well sometimes. She's brilliant... but it's just because I don't like wearing tights that I put up a bit of a fight there, I think.