Ten years ago actor Bertie Carvel read “Jonathan Strange &Mr. Norwell,” the tale of the revival of magic in an already skeptical England. As his eyes scanned the pages, he was already casting it, he says.

“I thought, ‘I wish I were famous enough to be cast in this, of course I never will be.’ Now 10 years later I had my head above the parapet enough that I got a shot at it. It was totally painless. I sent in a tape and had to wait, chewing my nails for a few weeks before hearing anything. But the feedback was great,” he says, in a noisy meeting room at a hotel here.

“And normally what happens to somebody like me at that point in my career, is you get fantastic feedback. ‘The director loves you and so on, but it has to go to the BBC.’ And the executives say, ‘Oh, no, we’ve never heard of this guy! We’d like someone FAMOUS.’”

Turns out that the British Carvel was famous enough. He’d already starred as the evil headmistress in “Matilda the Musical” for which he earned an Olivier and a Drama Desk Award. He costarred in “Les Miserables,” voiced dozens of video games, and costarred in TV shows like “Babylon,” “The Crimson Petal and the White,” “Sherlock.”

TV audiences will see what the shouting was about when the series, “Jonathan Strange &Mr. Norwell,” premieres on BBC America on Saturday.

The son of a psychologist and a journalist, (both his grandfather and great grandfather were journalists) Carvel wasn’t one of those people who knows early on what they plan to do.

“I didn’t want to become a journalist lest I let down 100 years of Carvel political journalists, but I think I’ve become a journalist of a different sort,” he says.

As a kid he took part in role-playing. “It’s like Dungeons and Dragons, you’re sitting around a table telling a story together with characters you’ve made up and a scenario that somebody polices. This (role-playing) is taking that one step further, and acting it out. You’re improvising essentially. It was kind of a hobby growing up but what it meant was that every weekend I’d be improvising some character or other, trying to give them some credible history, and feeling what it was to be in someone else’s skin.”

Transposing that to drama was a natural, says Carvel. “When I was at university I got involved in a play, and it just was like coming home. So doing stage plays at university and drama school at RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) was very natural to me to be in another person’s skin…”

He was still in drama school when he landed his first job, a role in the film, “Hawking,” in which he played Stephen Hawking’s best friend. From there he took part in radio repertory, TV bits, and a workshop at the National Theater.

“Then one thing leads to another. If you love what you do … I loved the pursuit of it,” he says. “I haven’t spent years and years dreaming of this being my career, I felt very fortunate to be working and doing something I loved. I didn’t have anything to fall back on. I wasn’t tempted by the riches of some other path,” he shrugs.

Acting comes naturally to everyone, he thinks. “But most of us forget… Kids can do it. And a lot of people sort of lose their knack, and I’m at my happiest really in my imagination.”

He’s never considered quitting and has worked steadily since he began. The job itself is easy, he feels, and he’s hard put to think of anything difficult about it. “You’re imagining yourself into something, and you do your homework, and make sure you’re in possession of as many facts as you can — then the rest is your imagination — which is coming back to childhood play. You’re letting imaginary forces work. And that’s very easy,” says Carvel, 37.

“It’s very familiar to me. It’s somewhere just behind my eyes this whole, rich world where I can go anywhere and do anything and be anything. I think I was an only child and lived a lot in that place, and I’ve not lost touch with it, which is really useful in my work. It’s what I have to do: is go to those places and it sort of comes easily to me to half close my eyes and think, ‘What would it be like if…’”