The good thing about being shy though as a child is that you become very observant because you're not really actively participating. You're sitting back watching everyone. I think that's really helped me as an actress because I'm good at observing people and then copying them for comic effect.

When I first came to America, I went into William Morris Endeavor for a meeting and I was like, "Yeah, I'm from Australia and I do comedy." I think that one of the reasons they signed me is because I wasn't like any other girl. Maybe girls don't get encouraged. The ones who get encouraged to move to Hollywood are the prettiest ones in their hometown of Iowa, or something. Whereas for me, where I come from in the western suburbs of Sydney, no one ever thought professional actors would come from there. Even my own family was like, "No one would want you on a show."

As part of my job, I got malaria really badly and was put in intensive care, and I had a hallucination because they give you this cocktail of drugs to fix you so you don't die, and I had this hallucination that I was at the Oscars and I won and I was a really good actress, and it was so real that when I came out of the hospital, I started saying to people I'm going to become an actress.

Because of my filming commitments in America, you have to sign contracts where you can't change your physical appearance.

The more I know about America, the better I'll be at performing American characters and American stories.

I don’t really care what I look like that much, and I think women out there should just be happy with the way they look. They shouldn’t really try to conform to any kind of stereotype. Just be happy and hopefully healthy.

If I get two lines in the script, I somehow turn it into 20. I've got a bit of a bad habit of doing that, of just embellishing my little moment.