Adam Rayner

That's the great thing about university: you've got people around you who are taking a risk and trying things out themselves. It gives you the confidence to try and take it to the next step, which was drama school.

Who knows - I would like to think that I'd be a fantastic president, and I'd be extremely levelheaded, and I'd be very fair, and I wouldn't persecute people, and I'd listen to the people that disagreed with me and all the rest of it, but who knows.

Everyone working on 'Tyrant' wants to present the world and the issues in it in an intelligent, open, fair, non-reductive kind of way. For the actors, we have to try and make these stories as truthful and compelling as possible.

Many of Judy Blume's books - which I devoured when I was growing up and where I found characters that were believable because they were a lot like me - caused considerable consternation when they were first published, but now they're widely accepted as an essential part of the children's literary canon.

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.