Your family’s talents go back generations – did you feel your career was practically paved out for you?
It’s never paved out for you. Perhaps there’s a door here, or a door there that may be a little more available, but you still have to push it open and walk through it. You come out of school and you’re in exactly the same place as everybody else and you’ve got to serve up the goods. But I don’t think I was ever forced into it either. My parents gently tried to force me away from acting, saying I should maybe try university. If anything, I felt that I wasn’t really good at anything else!
Such a theatrical family surrounding must have its benefits and downfalls – do you feel any pressure?
Yes, I do. I don’t feel pressure from them. The pressure is what I put on myself. I’m sure everyone has it to their own degree, whether they’ve come from a background where they were given no help whatsoever or a background like mine where I’m freely offered support by my parents who are very proud of the work that I do.
How was it getting into character for The Three Musketeers?
It was wonderful. It was a really joyous project, something I will always look back on as one of the best times of my life. When you’re the new kid on the block and you’re working with these extraordinary actors who you’ve admired for a very long time, it’s almost a little bit kid-in-candy-shop syndrome and you don’t quite know what to do with your arms. A friend of mine who’s seen the film says there is a lot of ‘old me’ in it from when I was at school; endlessly boisterous and enthusiastic! I just tried to remember going back to what life was like when you’re not cynical at all, you’re in love for the first time, the world is very green and very cosy.
How do you begin to prepare for a role like King Louis XIII?
I always read the scripts a lot of times. In that way, you never end up really having to learn lines actively, they sort of just fall into place. I like finding ‘isms’ with my characters and in this particular movie, it came from the costume because it was so fabulous. But really, it’s finding a period way of existing and as I say, standing in the costume dictates that, and the way you hold yourself. But they didn’t sit in the same way that we do, they didn’t walk in the same way that we do and when you’re the king, absolutely everyone is watching you for an example, so while you have to be completely carefree about the way you are, you’re still setting an example. You have to be sharp and you have to be the epitome of what that period would be. So I looked carefully to a lot of period pictures, paintings and saw the way people of royalty held themselves.
Do you prefer these extravagant roles or would you be just as happy in a long-running TV drama?
The more colourful sides of characters is something I really relish and when you’ve been to drama school, they train you to be chameleonic and really try to instil in you the idea that you can play absolutely anything. So I think, like any actor, you want to play wonderful, weird, witty large, small characters of all shapes and sizes; so the idea of character really appeals to me.
You were great in The Mystery Of Edwin Drood; can we expect to see you in anything similar anytime soon?
I am doing a play at the moment called Hay Fever – it’s more in my comfort zone. It’s about a very boho family in the 1920s who are all very strange and rather amusing.
You’ve done stage, TV and film – any preference?
I don’t think I could do without any of them. I think there’s something very magical about a film set. But I think there’s something that you never get on a film set that you do on stage which is this feeling of company and ensemble; that you are all in it together. Sometimes on a film you’re coming in for a couple of days and never meeting any of the lead actors, or any of the supporting cast, you’re doing your own thing. You’re just coming in and doing a job. But with stage, you’re there from the beginning right through to the end and you’re with a company - that is an irreplaceable sort of bond.
What’s your dream role?
I don’t really have one, as such. I think, ‘Give me something juicy, let’s see what I can do with it’ and then maybe it will turn into a dream role. But I think maybe the vision I have is to one day direct my own films and I guess that would be my dream role.
The Three Musketeers, starring Freddie Fox, is out on DVD and Blu-ray on February 27
