After Manchester he returned to London, trained for a year at Lamda and started landing his first professional roles soon after, his reputation growing incrementally ever since. 'You can't predict how it's going to turn out,' he says. 'I think what happens is you do your bit, you settle, and see sort of where you are in the grand picture of where everyone else is, and you go, "Ooh, I'd like a bit of what that person's doing, and I think I can get up to that standard, and I think I could be taken seriously enough to do that." ' Did he ever doubt he would be able to sustain an acting career, I ask. 'It sounds really arrogant but I don't think I did, no,' he says. 'I'm not someone who's naturally confident, I just knew no matter what it held for me, I was going to pursue it.' There are still moments, he says, when his confidence falters. The first day he stepped on set of the new Star Trek film, joining an illustrious line of British stars who have played the villain in a Hollywood blockbuster, he had a momentary feeling of being out of his depth. 'I didn't know what I was going to do and I had very little time to establish the character in that franchise,' he says.