There are people all over the world who like to write fan letters in the voice of their pet: 'Hello, my name is Fifi and I'm a labrador and I think you're great. Paw paw!'

I've played an awful lot of repressed people.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be an actor. It has just always been an inevitability on some level.

I don't like talking about myself, if I'm honest.

One of the great things about the 'Iron Man' franchise is that they employ fascinating actors who don't necessarily do action movies. Before 'Iron Man' you didn't associate Robert Downey, Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow with those kinds of films. There's an emphasis on repartee and wit.

Sometimes you can incubate a character and that can take me a month just sitting on it imagining it, doing everything from sketching it to taking long walks, but sometimes you can see the character immediately. A lot of it is instinctive.

Feminism is something I think about more when I watch the film, Christine, rather than when I was actually doing it, to be honest with you. But I do think it functions as a sort of interesting feministic critique, because you are seeing a woman who's resolutely incapable of behaving like the kind of woman that's acceptable at the time. She doesn't know how to play the game by everyone else's rules, and it makes you realize that actually there were rules that were functioning for a woman to be a careerist.