I've played lots of strong women in film, in big Hollywood films, and I've sometimes had a hard time in coming to a consensus of what makes a woman strong. What is it that positions her as a force to be reckoned with? And I think it's because there's an expectation from the get-go that she isn't. If you're not starting from a deficit as a point of view, but you're starting from an assumption that says, "Well, this is what women really are," then it's a really freeing experience as an actor and as a woman.

A role can go from being a babe to anything, as long as it's something that makes me curious.

You think once you've shown what you can do, and your movies have been successful, that snap, you work. So to discover the difference between guys' roles and girls' roles made me plain mad. It's unjust.

I'm definitely more attracted to chaos than to order. The point is, I find the female roles out there very cliché. If we are limited to being only lovers or mothers, we are limiting ourselves.

You love your child and you want to protect your child more than anything on this planet, and yet by the time they're 17, 18, they're going to step into this world, and that world will not feel the same compunction, necessarily, toward your daughter.

We have a certain warped sense of humor in Scandinavia, and that is what comes across in the choices in a lot of our movies.

If you asked somebody, 'what do you wish for in life?' they wouldn't say 'happiness.' I would have answered 'excitement, knowledge,' God knows - I mean, many, many different things, but certainly not 'happiness'. It seemed like a foreign concept to wish for something that specific and that singular.