I built a career on my archetype, and I'm grateful, but I'm trying to stretch.

I'm ready to do some classics. Maybe I wasn't in the beginning. I weighed 179 pounds when I got to New York, and I had that thick Southern accent. I still talk Southern, but I can do without it.

Patrick Swayze was risk-taking - because he not only did a transvestite, but in Donnie Darko, he played a pedophile! Talk about a risky thing for a movie star, and he jumped right in. We even shot some of those video sequences of his character out on his ranch. I mean, he opened his heart and his ranch to us. He was just an awesome guy.

I was up at Big Sur with Christopher Reeve and Christine Lahti, doing this woman in a big fat-suit - Mrs. Bassett in Tennessee Williams' Summer And Smoke - and my husband was in the show too, playing Lahti's fiancée. Every night he'd be proposing to beautiful Christine Lahti, and I'd barrel onstage in this fat-suit. I hated it! But I did it, because by then I knew that that was my casting.

Reality television, anybody can be a star at any minute.

Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise were both so generous to me on the Rain Man set. I remember Tom was in the trailer when I said to the makeup guy, "You know, I would really like to not wear any makeup. I just have this feeling that she wouldn't have any." And Tom said, "Yeah, that's cool!"

I didn't understand Southland Tales script at all! Is there a single word to describe it? Cacophony? It's celebrity meets pornography meets politics - it's unlike anything I've ever seen in my life. And slapstick humor, communism; I mean, what doesn't it have? It's crazy. I didn't go to Cannes, but I guess the first cut was three and a half hours or something?