“A good night in is a series of documentaries.”

“Acting is a craft to me: I just think you get better the more you do it. And then the irony to that is your doing it is not in your control. If it was up to most actors, we'd work all the time, and we'd always get better. But it's not in our control, so we have to wait to be given parts to do.”

“As a child, I got bored with my surroundings, so I would be another person for a little while.”

“Every time I see a good play or watch a good movie, I have the same feeling I had as a child of wanting to be that person on stage or wanting to run through the forest with a big dress on.”

“Granted, it's not easy to be a super-tall woman in Hollywood. But there are times when it works in my favour. In 'The Night Manager,' for example, both of my co-stars, Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston, are also well over 6 ft. and it was lovely to look a co-star in the eye and not have them standing on an apple box!”

“I am very tall, and when you're a teenager, you want to be like everyone else. I used to slump a lot; it's very human at that stage to want to be part of the crowd and not want any part of you that is sticking out.”

“I don't have a story about an epiphany in which I suddenly realised I wanted to be an actor. It was much more a case of the idea dawning on me gradually.”

“I feed off variety. I don't want to repeat myself if I can help it, but once they've seen you doing one thing, directors often just want you to do it again.”

“I guess the bigger you dream, the further you have to fall if you don't get it, so it can be a bit of a scary thing to be that ambitious.”

“I have to say that filming 'The Night Manager' was not just amazing but also very daunting at first. I used to describe myself as the token plebeian surrounded by all your national treasures. All that glittering talent in one place; I knew Hugh from Fry and Laurie videos that my grandpa used to watch, and Tom Hollander's 'Rev' is hilarious.”

“I loved Catherine Deneuve, Sophia Loren, and Ursula Andress. They had an incredible strength but fragility at the same time, especially Catherine Deneuve, who had an aloofness that impressed me.”

“I think I've developed a sort of ADD for geography now. When I've been in a country for too long, I'm like, 'I think it's time to leave.' I don't know what that's going to do to me in later life.”

“I think there's something beautifully old fashioned about waiting all week then sitting down and watching something on television together. I'm generation box set, accustomed to binging on multiple episodes at a time, which is fun but quite a solitary pursuit because you do it alone.”

“I was a dancer from a young age. My parents were dancers; we were taken to a lot of ballet as children. It occurred to me that what I liked more than dancing the steps was acting the story of whatever particular performance I was taking part in.”

“I was very new to working in front of the camera when I started shooting 'Gatsby', so I set myself the mission of gleaning as much information as possible out of the much more experienced actors. The cast was astoundingly talented.”

“I'm not a great sleeper. I try and do too many things every day. I think that I get very obsessive about parts and projects. I do let them kind of consume me, and when there's something on the horizon that I want to be involved in, I just kind of hurtle myself towards it.”

“It even sounds stupid to hear myself say the first costume designer I worked with was Catherine Martin, and she won an Oscar for it, but that was just my very lucky draw of roll of the dice.”

“Kissing in films, it's just another thing you have to do. It kind of becomes as technical as how to open a door, really.”

“My parents were ballet dancers, and I did a lot of ballet, too, so I think I learned quite early on how to hold my body. Although I do recall desperately wishing I was shorter at school.”

“Often, female characters are quite one dimensional, especially in a two hour film; television gives characters room to breathe and develop.”

“On a red carpet, you really want to feel your best, so to work with a designer who will shape a dress to your figure and take into consideration your opinions is really a blessing.”

“People ask me what it's like to be tall, and I don't know what to say because I don't know any different. I grew up in a very tall house, so I wasn't an anomaly there.”

“Red carpets are awful. They're like a kind of purgatory - you stand there, and there are cameras flashing everywhere. One of my first red carpets was in Cannes for 'The Great Gatsby,' and I'd never seen anything like it.”

“Sometimes I have a nervous breakdown over my suitcase - over socks - because your brain just goes, 'I just can't pack again. I can't.' You're looking at your suitcase going, 'I'm in five countries in two weeks, and it's four different seasons.' That's when my brain melts.”

“That world of spies and espionage, there's a coldness to it. That's what makes those worlds fascinating - and what makes le Carre's work so interesting.”

“There is something about a theatre room that is really like a laboratory for trying things and failing, because you have time to do that, and you can explore something deeply and discard it if it's not working.”