If you are an actress in L.A., on your 40th birthday they should just hand you the keys to the lunatic asylum.

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

Female ambition is such a complicated thing to play because it is an aggressive quality, and people respond very badly to women exhibiting any kind of aggression.

My alter egos have changed a lot over the years. When I was a child, I was a black horse called Storm. Whinnying and jumping over bamboo poles in the garden took up pretty much my entire childhood.

You don't have to conform to a very specific aesthetic today, whereas 1950s women definitely had to.

I love the theatre and I love working in the theatre but I'm a big cinefile and I love the movies. I also do scribble but to limited success! I think I find being in a room on my own quite hard, which I think a lot of actors do because what we do is so inter-active. It's a very supportive profession... despite its reputation for being highly competitive it's actually one of the most collaborative professions you can do in the arts because you're always working in a team.

I really like films and plays that cross over different genres. So I'd like to do something that you think is a drama and then you think is a supernatural thing and then becomes a drama again. That's very vague.