I've always thought that a lot of the problems in the world would be solved if a spaceship did arrive, then anyone with one head and two arms and two legs would be your brother! It wouldn't matter where they were from or what they believed or anything. It might be good for us.

I really enjoy working with younger actors. I just feel like we're all peers together.

I think that's what I really dig about science fiction these days - we've caught up to it in a way. It's no longer about people with huge brains. Now it's really much more, as Jim Cameron says, the nature of being human. What it is to be human in society. How to retain one's humanity in society.

There's something to be said for going right into people's living rooms. I think actors have always loved that medium - you're right in there with people in their homes. A lot of very audacious work is being done on television.

In Yale they convinced me I had no talent, even though I was always working. They cast me mostly as prostitutes and old women, and I stayed because I loved the writers. I loved Chris Durang and Wendy Wasserstein. I was always doing their work in the Yale Cabaret.

When I'm making the movie, I absolutely do. I work so hard, and out of the raw material that is the script and talks I have with the director, the writer, I create, I hope, a very specific person who wouldn't have otherwise existed. However, do I then attach and hang on to the finished product? No. The experience of the creation of the character is what feeds me, what excites me, challenges me.

I have always been uncomfortable with a series of movies. I hate that word 'franchise' - it always makes me think of French fries. What I felt each time was that we were going for broke, that this was going to be the last in the series. You can't count on anything.