It used to be the one or the other, right? You were the 'bad girl' or the 'good girl' or the 'bad mother' or the 'good mother,' 'the horrible businesswoman who eschewed her children' or 'the earth mother who was happy to be at home baking pies,' all of that stuff that we sort of knew was a lie.

I'm just as intrigued by acting as ever. It's an ongoing process. There's no arrival. There's no point at which you say "Oh, OK, done it, got it." It just doesn't happen. And that's true of any creative endeavor. For me, it's just a lifelong interest. I'm very much interested in the craft. I started by doing plays and it took me a long time to feel comfortable doing movies, working with cameras. I felt like I was a theater actress pretending that I was a movie actress for quite a while. Now, I just love the process of working with cameras and being on a set and trying to put a film together.

And if there's anything movies can do in a way that I just love, and I love as an audience is, "Show me something I don't know about. Show me something I haven't seen."

I remember hearing someone say that good acting is more about taking off a mask than putting one on, and in movie acting, certainly that's true. With the camera so close, you can see right down into your soul, hopefully. So being able to do that in a way is terrifying, and in another way, truly liberating. And I like that about it.

I think where I've instinctively found myself is that I am somewhat guarded in my public life. Being interviewed or being photographed or just in public attention, I have a certain reserve. But when I'm working I feel like I'm very open. At least I like to believe that I feel like nothing is held back when I'm in front of a camera. That's my job.

A lot of acting is working with your own psyche in order to allow yourself to be open and reveal yourself. But then of course there's a healthy part of you that says, "Well, don't do that." You know, you're going to be in front of people. You could look foolish. You could get it wrong. You could be too big or too small or not realistic or whatever those things are. People might criticize you. There's all kinds of reasons not to be open. But you do want to be open.

One of the things that I love when I go to a film or when I'm reading some book or whatever, is to be told a secret I thought only I knew and then someone says, "Oh my gosh, you know, too." And film can take us into private moments in a way that the theater, I think, kind of can't, and that's one of the reasons I like doing films. And the way a book can is that these little secrets and the private things that go on in our minds that maybe we haven't shared with anyone, and then someone writes it or shows it to you in a film, you think, "Oh, that's me. Oh my God, that's me, I have that secret."