It's quite hard for people to just accept that they're very contradictory.

It's quite hard for people to just accept that they're very contradictory.

I noted about Cate Blanchett was her very positive lack of concern for how she turns out in Cinderella. She is happy to be a villainess and very pleased to be encouraged as I did with her to reveal this backstory and feel as though this was very human, that this broken heart of hers, if you might regard it that way, would be visible, but she never played for sympathy and I really admired that about her, so she's just there, she just is and uncompromisingly.

I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be.

If you've done a brilliant version it becomes something else.

Actually I think 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' could sit very very perfectly in the middle of a Disney world I think.

Actors are the best and the worst of people. They're like kids. When they're good, they're very very good. When they're bad they're very very naughty.