speech, which sound very painful. What was the most difficult thing about this role? CF: You can't know what it is like to be a member of the royal family. It is not the same as being an actor. You are born into it and that is everything you have known. I think you can only guess at that. So that was a tremendous mystery. Tom has been talking about all the things that could go wrong if you misjudged the stammer. But things could also go wrong if you misjudged the level of agony and pain. It was important to touch on things in this man's childhood that indicated he wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and yet we had to avoid it becoming a poor me or poor-little-rich-boy story. Self-pity would have killed us. Yet there is a little boy lost in your performance... CF: I drew that from images of him. I feel he had never quite been encouraged out of his childhood. He hadn't been given responsibility. He joined the navy and saw action, but health problems meant it was over quickly. He was never expected to be the King. Most people didn't have much faith in him to do anything. He stayed where he was... At 43, a series of immense shocks meant he had to grow into something else. The film seems to be about what it means to have a voice. Do you think you have a Colin Firth voice?