Actors are programmed to see the worst. If you're talking about an actor's TV series, you say, "I loved you last night." And they go, "What about the week before?" They immediately worry.

American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture.

The more uncompromisingly specific you are the more you end up touching the bigger universal truths.

Sometimes your body language is enough for an actor to know that you're not happy. And you don't really need to say it out loud if you deal with actors you know very well. And I don't think you really need to be explicit.

Actors enjoy being treated as ordinary people.

Trans stories have now entered the mainstream in this fantastic way, but the most important thing is what follows from that is hopefully a shift in the experience of trans people - so that there's more acceptance in the culture to the issues they face and more support.

Well, I'm half Australian, half English and I live in London. That is the only reason I came upon this story. My Australian mother, Meredith Hooper, was invited in late 2007 by some Australian friends to make up a token Australian audience in a tiny fringe theater play reading of an unproduced, unrehearsed play called 'The King's Speech.