"He studied history and politics at the University of Exeter, concentrating on the Russian Revolution, and afterward became a journalist for the "Croydon Advertiser".Unhappy in his career, he read one day how actor Trevor Eve gave up architecture for acting; this, along with reading "Hamlet" and Peter Brook's "The Empty Space" back-to-back, made him "light up inside somewhere" and spurred him to enter the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School at 25.