Lots of different parts that are very different to you

His breakthrough came in 2002, as Baltimore cop Jimmy McNulty in The Wire. The role freed him up as an actor, he thinks; back then "I wouldn't have got that job in http://www.toppromdressescheap.com, playing a blue-collar cop", but he hopes he might do now. Does he really think his Eton background has been limiting for him as an actor? The evidence, after all, suggests the opposite. On the all-male shortlist for the Bafta rising star award this year two of the five nominees, Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne, were Old Etonians, and West himself went home with the lead actor award, for his performance as Fred West in TV drama Appropriate Adult. His classmate Damian Lewis has been hugely successful with Homeland; other Old Etonians, Harry Lloyd and Harry Hadden-Paton, are building strong acting careers.

Still, he does believe it has been limiting "in certain ways, yeah. As an actor, you tend to be typecast, and you tend to probably want to do a greater variety of http://www.toppromdressescheap.com/faviana-c-2.html than your typecasting might allow. So I'm not pleading I'm terribly disadvantaged and what a hard time I've had. But what I've always liked is to play lots of different parts that are very different to you, and so in that way you have to go beyond people's expectations."

He has played a good range in the past few years: a general in the film Centurion; villains in Johnny English Reborn and John Carter; the war hero, drinker and news broadcaster Hector Madden in TV drama The Hour; Iago in Othello at the Crucible. I ask him what he would love to http://www.toppromdressescheap.com/la-femme-c-5.html, and his eyes narrow greedily. "Where do I start? I wish I'd done all the young Shakespeares, I really do, because I feel I'm quite good at it, and I'm too old now, and I really regret not pushing that. I didn't because I thought people would laugh." Why? "Oh, because it was my deepest dream, I suppose, and you get a bit embarrassed ... And then I was watching Bond, and I was going 'God, I would have loved to have been Bond.' I'm a bit old now." He's 43, a year younger than Daniel Craig. "Bit long in the tooth for Bond."