I love costume dramas, I love performing in them, because in a funny kind of way, you feel more free. You know about the period, you can read the books, you can see the paintings, but you've never actually going to know what it was like. You can kind of stretch those boundaries a bit.

Everybody can take a good picture. Everybody is interesting. Everyone has an interesting face. Some people are more difficult or more nervous or more tired. When you do a movie, you have action, you're talking, you're moving. You don't see the camera. Taking a picture with a photographer, you don't talk, it's more difficult than in a movie for your body to relax, to be yourself.

Empathy is the main thing, putting yourself in somebody else's shoes and trying not to judge.

I see a pair of shoes I adore, and it doesn't matter if they have them in my size. I buy them anyway.

Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.

Nice is the worst word.

In L.A., I'm twice the size - height and everything else - of most of the other actresses who are going for an audition.