What I love about L.A. and Washington, D.C. is that they're almost the opposite of each other. L.A. is a very creative space while D.C. is a very cerebral space. So, they're the ying and the yang in my world. I like them both for their own reasons.
I had a place to go to university; I was going to study history. I was in New York doing 'Arcadia,' and I suddenly thought, 'It feels a bit weird to go from a New York stage to Manchester University.' It didn't quite feel right.
I've never lived anywhere else in my life, I have a massive love-hate relationship with this city. I grew up in the western suburbs in the '80s and for everything we had to go to south Bombay - so you lived the whole city, in a sense.
I find the aristocratic parts of London so unattractive and angular; the architecture is so white and gated. But in New York, it's different - even uptown it's really grand, and there's no real segregation there. It's all mixed up.
Nothing changes and very little happens in Paris. This is a great place to work without distraction - and then I run away to New York, where I have a life!
London has always moved and surprised me, reinventing itself in ways both fresh and familiar. It's a contrary, complex and creative city, an anarchist of a thousand faces - fickle and unfailing, tender and bleak, ambitious and callous.
Just as London is not one endless afternoon tea, L.A. isn't all super-fit, health food-crazy freaks.
There's a difference between Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Brooklyn and Queens. There's a difference.
Tokyo may have more money and Kyoto more culture; Nara may have more history and Kobe more style. But Osaka has the biggest heart.
I kind of assumed all of Australia was like the Gold Coast - so I was telling people Australians just work out and go to the beach. Like, Australia has it figured out! But then I went to Sydney, and it was nothing like the Gold Coast - but I still loved it.
New York is like the weirdest city in the United States, in a great way, and Los Angeles is probably more similar to most of America.
People question what I thought of Oxford. Students used to talk about the 'Oxford bubble' because the place can make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and essays.
I find Edinburgh a stimulating place in which to live, with it being a city of contrasts, both architecturally and socially, and each district having a definite character.
Philadelphia merely seems dull because it's next to exciting Camden, New Jersey.
