London and L.A. are both places I feel I can call home. It's a nice balance of Californian calm and that slightly more engaged, electric London vibe that I've always loved.
I can run a good few miles. I box a little.
I had done a couple of auditions for 'Amistad' and didn't feel it was going to go any further - and then the call came about heading to Los Angeles to work with Steven Spielberg. It was surreal: exciting, challenging, overwhelming.
I wanted to be an actor ever since I got on stage for the first time, aged 13. Before that, I thought I might follow in the medical footsteps of my parents: my father was a doctor, my mother a pharmacist.
It's hard to maintain a life when you do a play. You feel you have to pretend to go through a normal day, knowing that in the evening you'll be doing this.
The idea of making a film - a film that I had certainly never seen before - about the slave experience was a huge responsibility. It's a project that requires a wider understanding of the geopolitical nature of the slave trade, of historical and modern-day racism.
You do as much research as you can for any project.
Normally, if you're lucky, the idea of a film you have in your head is more or less what you get back when you see it after the editing and the whole post-production process.
It's hard to tell the story if you're not involved yourself, emotionally.
Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.
I wouldn't be the same actor if I couldn't do theater.
I'd never really considered film. If I'd thought about film more growing up, I probably would have changed my name. I had no concept of my name in lights.
There are many different ways the public can respond to actors - they can see you on TV and feel they know you and own you, and there can be something quite cornering about that.
I was attracted to 'Half of a Yellow Sun' because of the story.
The Second World War simplified things like race, and people came down on very clear lines.
We take it for granted sometimes that certain parts of our history are told, and we take it for granted that we know all that stuff, and we move forward along on that basis, but there are also massive gaps, and we have to try to address them.
I've always liked the idea of being a father. And I've always romanticised it, because I lost my father when I was young. In a way, all of the complications that come with my career are about that.
As an actor, you express certain things because they need to be expressed, and then you don't really feel a need to do it again. I want to feel something else, you know?
Solomon Northup is one of the most remarkable people I've ever encountered in my life; one of the most amazing stories I have ever been in any kind of contact with. To not tell that story would have been disgraceful, in my opinion.
I think, as a younger actor, you are more open to the experience. And to an extent, you want to go into things blind and energised as if you were 15. Keep that terror.
