Like any classic you hope to get rid of all the varnish that's built up over the centuries where people expect it to be in a certain way. It's a mighty play. It's about a very old king who also happens to be a very old father, so you've got the state and the domestic levels in there together. It's a story in extremis. Everyone knows the end, there's only two people left alive.

Most films I've worked on have had large casts, but they've been wonderful people. I think the monkey in Pirates of the Caribbean is the most temperamental costar I've had. It would throw tantrums like you wouldn't believe.

If in the sex scene you happen to be naked in front of a lot of other people you've just got to put that aside, in the same way that you have to put that aside in a fully-clothed intense dialogue scene because you're entering into that particular imaginative state of play.

Someone told me that there's a connection to Superman, that in an early edition of the Green Lantern comics, Tomar Re was the envoy to Krypton. That was fascinating to me.

Yes, anally retentive men are my forte!

I wouldn't mind meeting some of the people I've attempted to portray from the olden, olden days. They probably would all have really terrible skin and horrible bad breath, and I'd have to give them an Altoid.

I went to England in the '70s, and I was in my early 20s. There was still a residue of that era of being an underclass or colonial. I assume it must have been a more aggressive and prominent attitude 40 years before that, because Australia internationally wasn't regarded as having much cultural value. We were a country full of sheep and convicts.