I tried not to get too addicted to reading the Whedonesque website, because it could become obsessive. They were a charming and loyal bunch of people to whom I'm eternally grateful.

It was fine when I was single and childless. Carrying the responsibility of screwing up your kids at the same time is huge. I remember when I got Peter Pan, and I told my mom and dad and my friends I was leaving - again, I was cast way late on - in the next two days to go to Australia for four months, and they all went "Bye! See you in four months!" But no one said "We need you," and I really knew that it was time to think about someone else for a change.

Joss Whedon writes beautiful drama. His sensitivity and his sense of drama and scenes are pretty exceptional. There's no one else writing like him, really, in sci-fi and TV. That's not to say there are no astonishing writers on TV. I was nervous about coming to America and playing an English person who speaks very English when all the writers are American, because it's a very particular thing to imitate, and if it's badly imitated, it sounds painfully contorted and silly. And he writes very well for English people. It was Joss Whedon who persuaded me.

Family holidays and weekends are really brightly colored memories, full of my mother and father, rather than our nannies and au pairs.

I couldn't get any of the ingenue roles when younger because at 5 feet 9 inches with a deep voice I was always too... genue. My career has completely happened since I was 29.

Usually the casting process is lengthy and humiliating, but in this instance, The Ghost Writer, it was just too easy. I was sitting in a rental car on an L.A. street and my cell phone rang, and it was Roman Polanski on the line. I couldn't really believe my luck. He said, "See you in Berlin." I sat staring at a palm tree, thinking how surreal that was.

When the Hollywood thing happened, I thought at some point I'd get to the front of the queue: 'Yes, hello, I'd like to play that role.' But you don't. You just join a different queue.