David Turner, who plays alongside Riley in Arcadia as the cuckolded Ezra Chater, was recently asked which was better, the cast's British or American contingent. He had this sardonic reply: 'Well, of course, the Americans are better because the British people, they're not good with words. See, Americans are weaned on Shakespeare, you know? British people are sort of just learning about that.' But Riley has another theory: 'What we sell to the world very well are both ends of the spectrum. Occasionally someone who's just kind of regular cracks it but generally you're either a hard nut or posh. They do like a bit of posh. But I,' he hastens to add, 'don't have a bone of posh in me.' Riley grew up in Maidstone, Kent, in a family that had 'no connection' to theatre. 'My dad's a chartered surveyor and my mum's a primary school teacher, but at four or five I said I wanted to join a drama group and started writing plays.' He studied English literature at Birmingham and graduated with a First before going on to LAMDA. After finishing in 2005, he had a dizzying start to his career when he was cast in the thriller A Few Days In September, alongside Juliette Binoche and Nick Nolte. Since then, he's had a steady stream of jobs (medical drama Monroe opposite James Nesbitt, last year's A Bouquet of Barbed Wire and Mr Wickham in Lost in Austen in 2008) but you probably won't realise how many things you've seen him in: he has the sort of features that can look unassumingly bloke-next-door-like one moment and then rearrange themselves into something fiercely, intently handsome the next.