That's definitely true! It was before my father died, so I can't attribute it to an obsession with death. When I was seven, I loved those old Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone. The Scarlet Claw was one of my faves. And I loved all the Halloween's and that film about the haunted house... Burnt Offerings, with Oliver Reed. Every birthday party was a slumber party and we'd watch horror films.

People love events - they love performances, they love music - and I think Australians are great entertainers.

With a role like Hedda Gabler, which is incredibly complicated, you often feel that you haven't even scratched the surface the first time around, so you relish the opportunity to do it again, particularly with an ensemble of actors and the company we assembled. But when you do that in films you somehow have to make some attempt to uncross people's arms and you have to justify why you're doing it.

Theater is all about foyers and conversation and digesting what you've seen.

It seems like people increasingly just can't be by themselves because they're so used to having an epicenter on the Internet that actually exists for other people. Until someone clicks onto your Facebook page, it doesn't mean anything.

I'm not interested in playing characters who see the world through my prism. I think the journey of understanding any character is to see how they tick and how they differ from you.

What I find interesting is this ricochet effect, that the audience perceives the work and then does something with it, throws it back to the world, and there's an ongoing interaction between work and audience, which doesn't belong to the artist anymore - from the moment you release it, it doesn't belong to anybody.