I think, you know, as an actor we get these terribly sort of pretentious ideas in our heads. We try to take everything very seriously at first, you know, until we lighten up, we get onboard, and have a laugh.

Filming Pride & Prejudice (2005) was a joy and made for one of my happiest summers ever. It could well be that the story brings out the best in people - and it sounds so cheesy, but we really did behave like a family. The girls playing the younger sisters had never been on a film set before and wanted to socialize all the time, so we picnicked, hung out in a beautiful country house and went swimming naked in a lake. It was idyllic."

I`m probably not going to play a junkie and that`s OK because there are other people who will do it better.

I`d really love to live in New York for awhile. That`s what I`m hoping to do.

I`ve been doing Pride and Prejudice all summer, so suddenly the chance to be holed up with a bunch of marines is quite attractive, and probably a necessary dose of male energy.

It`s something that I am going over in my head about the whole video game thing, and whether you support violence by being in a film like this. I mean, to me, it`s incredibly unreal and it`s all about the action, and just explosions.

I think it`s OK to play to your strengths, and if I have a quality of Englishness that people like, I won`t hide that. I`m probably not going to play a junkie and that`s OK because there are other people who will do it better. A view that`s been held for a long time is that the best way to prove oneself as an actor is to play the grittiest roles out there. I don`t agree with that.

I think you can make a choice with that kind of thing. You can certainly keep a low public profile if you want to. Ideally, I`d like to be living in upstate New York, in a house that I could renovate and fill with books and clothes, while being offered the kind of parts that are currently going to Kate Winslet and Nicole Kidman.

It was in New York, and I`ve always wanted to film in New York. And the writer was a teenage friend of mine. We did youth theatre together when we were 16 and always had a dream of making a film together. And ten years later, we`ve done it. So it`s great.

You can certainly keep a low public profile if you want to.

[On the direction from Joe Wright in "Pride and Prejudice."] You can get quite self-conscious at times, there`s this business of your close up coming up, but in that big ball scene he put three cameras on it. And in lots of the dinner scenes too, so you wouldn`t actually know when your moment was coming. That`s why it`s got that lovely unaware quality to it, you really did feel it`s being observed. I think it`s because people didn`t know they were being watched really, that`s what you get, this window on life.

And I like the look on people`s faces when I say I`m doing this movie called Pride and Prejudice and they kind of smile, and then I say I`m in a movie called Doom and they kind of do a double take and try and put the two things together. And they never quite manage to.

Nothing can teach you what it`s like to work on a film set, and the best education there can be for an actor is to walk up the street and observe human nature.

I don`t think RADA wanted me, actually. When I was at Oxford I had a boyfriend at Central [School of Speech and Drama] and it looked like the most fantastic life, but I think not going makes you more free. Nothing can teach you what it`s like to work on a film set, and the best education there can be for an actor is to walk up the street and observe human nature.

I`ve never done a film in Los Angeles, so I don`t know what that would be like - that experience of working in a big studio. I can`t imagine... yet.

The job of an actor is the same in all of them, really. I mean, you`re just creating a character that you hope people will believe, so it doesn`t make that much of a difference really.

In the original computer game of Doom, you not only have to kill things. You have to pulverise them.

The response to Pride has been so overwhelming. I mean, people have really loved it. And it`s so rewarding because we had such a fun time making that film, and it was made with so much heart, that it`s lovely that people seem to be responding in kind to that.

I`d love to say I was the kind of person who has an outline. But the only outline I have is that I want to carry on doing this all my life.

I think you tend to try, during the time you`ve got off, to forget about the film. It was such a total world. I mean, the sets were claustrophobic, and as soon as you were on there, you were right back into it.

I`ve got friends who are pyrotechnics who do big fire shows, so I`m really fascinated by that.

When you`re dressed up like Miranda Frost [from Die Another Day (2002)], people assume you have a similar character, but I was 21 and quaking inside.