It's tough, acting. You have to walk two lines of a tightrope. There's the all-consuming fear of failure: I'm about to fall flat on my face. There's that and there's also confidence - you have to be confident in order to try things - and they fight each other all the time.

I love being around great actors and film-makers, and I try to hide the fact that I'm in awe of them.

I no longer think in terms of, Ooh, this is a great role and what is it going to do for - actually, I've never really thought about what something is going to do for my career.

I'm very much a hippie from Northern California.

I think that with any emotion - fear, love, nervousness - if the actor's feeling it, then the audience feels it.

One comment by a female lobbyist really shocked me. She said, "Washington is a contact sport." I asked, "What do you mean by that?" And she just said, "Well, it's all men - and they're very contact-y. They touch a lot." Women say that's just part of the game.

I find that the monsters are usually the people that I have the most empathy for because they're the ones that are hurt the most. There's a reason why they're the monsters.