Actress

I became completely obsessed with the Royal family, or at least the psychology behind them.

My favourite thing is cooking for my friends. There are 13 of us who all met at university. They come round once a week, and I make a huge lasagne.

It's quite rare that you find something that you can quite literally have an absolute ball doing, as well as the tough stuff and the difficult stuff and the pain.

When you see yourself on a 40-ft. screen. you go, 'Oh My God! I look so weird!'

Acting is a very weird job. But if you know you're an actor, you just have to do it. You can't do anything else.

I'm not a model. I don't really think much about how I look. If I did, I'd go mad.

Before filming 'The Crown,' I couldn't care less about the royal family. But now... I'm obsessed.

When I was auditioning for drama school and looking for a monologue, it was all, 'I'm whinging about my period or my baby that has died or my boyfriend...' Why can't you have a normal girl, talking about ideas?

I do tend to find when you're playing characters, often - just for the time you're playing them - there are sides of your personality that get stronger because you draw on them more.

I don't see the point of grumpy people.

I've been really lucky to work with a lot of theater directors in the film, like Stephen Daldry on 'The Crown' and Richard Eyre on 'The Dresser.'

Wherever you are in the world, whoever you are with, sometimes you feel desperately lonely.

We know all about actors and singers because they do interviews, but with the royals, everything's so tightly controlled. They live this strange reality behind closed doors.

I doubt myself a lot but go forward at full throttle anyway.

Peter Morgan's writing is so much about what you don't say: you're saying one thing but there's 10 other things going on, and those are the best writers like Chekhov... they're masters at a sort of naturalism, and yet there is all the subtext.

On screen, everyone stares at your face, but on stage, you can basically play anybody.

Family relationships are just so fascinating - how they shape you as a person, how you can wound each other, how you're imprinted in a way by your family and the conditions under which you grow up.

To play anybody real and famous is very scary.

Chris McQuarrie cast me in 'Mission Impossible' because he'd seen 'The Crown' and loved it.

I try to focus on each day and try to be the best I can be today.