Acting is about communicating what it is like to be human: the pain, the laughs, the misery, the joy. I suppose I am searching to have it all.

The job of an actor is the same in all of them, really. I mean, you're just creating a character that you hope people will believe, so it doesn't make that much of a difference really.

We, Brits, need to be sort of loosened up. And there's some transfer overseas, I think the more American fare that comes to the U.K., the more cross-fertilization there is that's perhaps changing.

I don't think RADA wanted me, actually. When I was at Oxford I had a boyfriend at Central [School of Speech and Drama] and it looked like the most fantastic life, but I think not going makes you more free. Nothing can teach you what it's like to work on a film set, and the best education there can be for an actor is to walk up the street and observe human nature.

Fancy optimizers have fancy bugs.

As a woman, you feel that you shouldnt want to better yourself against others. Ambition has become such an ugly word, hasnt it?

I think, you know, as an actor we get these terribly sort of pretentious ideas in our heads. We try to take everything very seriously at first, you know, until we lighten up, we get onboard, and have a laugh.