As an actor I suppose you're constantly observing. I don't sit in restaurants making notes, I don't live my life in order to then feed it into my work.

I'm old enough to remember the days when you spoke to one person from one outlet and that was the conversation. But now what happens is you speak to people and what you say gets translated into Portuguese, then into Mandarin, through a German prism and then back into English and bears little to no resemblance between - to the exchange or - that you had initially with the journalist or to what you originally said.

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.

What I love about the theater is that you know who you're acting for: your audience. And the thing I find really hard in film is, you don't. The audience is invisible. And we're sitting there, hoping there's other people out there.

The thing I love about live performance the most, is that the doors are closed, the lights are turned down, and the audience has to be reverential to what's happening onstage.

If I had my way, if I was lucky enough, if I could be on the brink my entire life - that great sense of expectation and excitement without the disappointment - that would be the perfect state.

I discovered early on that some performers live their life in order to act, so all their relationships are simply an experience that they can feed back into their work. Which I find vampiric.