I was a tomboy running around in the garden. I used to play on a local cricket team. I grew up with all boy cousins, for the most part, and my brother. My mother was in the kind of late-sixties, early-seventies origins of female emancipation. And she was very much like, "You're not going to be defined by how you look. It's going to be about who you are and what you do."

I've been very lucky. Directors I've worked with have been very amenable to changes.

What's amazing about the show ["Girls"] - the first (season) is about the girls and then the second (season) is about the boys as well. There's something so human about it.

There's so much of a desire in the entertainment industry for newness, a desire to build somebody up and then treat them as old news within six months. I think you'd be naive if you didn't try to hold on to your own way of doing things.

I hate it when, in films, the girl looks perfect in every shot. It's quite nice if there's a bit of dark circles underneath the eyes, if we see the reality of the situation that the person is going through.

I was into Virginia Woolf and James Joyce [at university] and I think we all thought that [Charles] Dickens wasn't that cool.

I think Nelly [Ternan] actually has something very conservative about her, and she's very judgmental of (this other character's) situation, and can see that's about to happen to herself. So she judges it even more harshly [because] it's what she fears becoming.