It was fine when I was single and childless. Carrying the responsibility of screwing up your kids at the same time is huge. I remember when I got Peter Pan, and I told my mom and dad and my friends I was leaving - again, I was cast way late on - in the next two days to go to Australia for four months, and they all went "Bye! See you in four months!" But no one said "We need you," and I really knew that it was time to think about someone else for a change.

If the role is right and it's another situation of having a benevolent genius at the head of it, someone who likes actors, and will protect the actors from the ravages of reality-TV drama. It's a brutal world, and you need to have a strong creative team who can stand up to the network.

I was lucky, because Ewan McGregor had already been shooting with Roman Polanski for about a month before I got role. And he did a faultless impersonation of what it was going to be like. So when direction happened, it was like, "Oh yeah. That's what Ewan said was going to happen." And so it was a little bit less debilitating than it might have been.

When Roman Polanski did give you a "Great, great, great!" you were just like, "Thank you, Lord, for this magical moment."

As I was getting into the helicopter, a slightly nervous actor said to me, "Whatever you do, don't say to the helicopter pilot, 'Show me what this baby can do.'" So I of course, got into it and said, "Show me what this baby can do." And we just had this insane helicopter ride. It's the sort of thing you only get to do on movie sets. I'm so lucky to have done it and have that chance.

My parents have always been cool. They even became surrogates to friends of mine who didn't have such supportive parents.

I am a pathetic and gushing Nick Hornby fan, and I wanted to be in High Fidelity, and I wanted to be in About A Boy, and those two directors - one who's a dear friend, and one who has never cast me in anything, despite my pleading... So there was another Nick Hornby script going around being cast by a friend of mine, and she said, "There's a very small role in it, but you'd be right for it." I was like "I don't care how small, I'm going to be in this Nick Hornby film."