Sophie Okonedo

“I always find something in all the characters I play. I fall in love with them a little bit.”

“I am not a practising Jew, and I am not embedded in Nigerian culture, but I have a sense of those things inside me, which is very handy for acting. There are a lot of things I can draw on.”

“I just get offered a lot more work in America than I do in Britain.”

“I'm not from an acting family. I'm from a working class family.”

“Being a character actor, I can go on until I'm 70 or 80; I'm not bound to the way I look.”

“My first love is a wonderful script. It's the story.”

“I like having the script before I start. With new plays, you're constantly developing as you're doing it. It's really frightening. You don't quite know how it's going to end up.”

“I listen much better when I'm acting than I do in real life.”

“When I do things that aren't very good, I'm worse as an actor. I don't know what I pick up - but it's something not very nice.”

“Sometimes I really need the money, really need to go straight to work. But if I had the absolute choice - money no object, my mortgage paid off - I'd really just work once or twice a year - but wouldn't everybody! - or at least do a different job sometimes.”

“The photo shoot I always feel a bit embarrassed about because I don't really know what to do with myself, but they usually don't use a bad photo, so you can't worry too much. So my main concern is that I just look a bit more like myself.”

“As a child, I certainly wanted to have hair that I could grow long and flip around. I no longer want that. My own hair that I have day to day is a fuzzy afro. And that's who I am.”

“To get an award for something you are having a ball doing is a real buzz.”

“I get offered loads of unusual stuff. I just don't do loads because I like staying at home a lot, and I'm a little bit lazy. I don't get that thing of going from film to film that people do. It would drive me nuts, and that level of fame is quite scary.”

“I like gardening.”

“There is a lot more opportunity now, and I welcome all the conversations we are having about diversity, about women and about class... I come from a very working-class background, and I think the class thing is still probably more tricky.”

“It was a dream to be on Broadway as a kid, so to actually end up there, I loved it.”

“My main form of exercise is my bike. I don't have a car, so I cycle everywhere.”

“I love the industry I'm in, and it's been really generous to me.”

“When I take on a role, all I tend to do is get to know the script and ask millions of questions, and keep fine tuning what I think the character is trying to say.”