When I'm acting, I'm in the director's hands. I'm very happy to be. I like to be focused on what I'm doing.

Friendship is one of the most tangible things in a world which offers fewer and fewer supports.

I certainly have been guilty of trying to sweep things under the carpet.

Everything is important, but there is a weight to these big or expected things and then there is the logistics of them and it's trying to find, while you worry about for instance the ballroom scene, how do you get 500 people to go to the loo in corsets and don't cost you an hour and how do you remember while you're organizing all that to take a breath and say, 'Well the scene is about all of that and it's about Prince hand on the small of Cinderella back as well' and we need time to do that properly as well.

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.

I don't think Hamlet is mad, nor is he predisposed to be a gloomy or tragic figure.

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