Look, it’s one of the great mysteries of the world, I cannot answer that question. I think I’m vaguely blonde. To be perfectly frank, I don’t know.
I never really think about my gender, first and foremost – until a door is closed to you. Until you can see a parallel opportunity with a man in a similar place in his career and you think, That opportunity is not open to me or my fellow actresses. That’s interesting.
Things present themselves to you, and it’s how you choose to deal with them that reveals who you are. We all say a lot of things, don’t we, about who we are and how we think. But in the end it’s your actions, how you respond to circumstance that reveals your character.
As an actor I suppose you’re constantly observing. I don’t sit in restaurants making notes, I don’t live my life in order to then feed it into my work.
It’s important to travel and move and have a continual set of experiences so you’ve got more to feed back into your work. For me, it’s a natural thing.
The notion of fate and destiny is a very Greek concept. Working in the theater you do think a lot about that, because as a storyteller you do think, ‘At what point was this always going to happen and what part have I got a hand in being able to change things?’
Oh god, I wish. I really wish. If I’m time-poor, which I usually am, that’s the first thing to go. And I know it shouldn’t be, I know I should be really regular, but I like to get it done as quickly as possible.
Women have been doing very, very strange things for centuries. I mean ancient Egyptians were already doing that, but I don’t necessarily judge people who do. I don’t really think it makes people look better; they just look different.
You know you’ve made it when you’ve been moulded in miniature plastic. But you know what children do with Barbie dolls – it’s a bit scary, actually.
I remember when I was 26. My father died when I was young and my mother didn’t have a lot of money, so I thought, ‘I want to own a flat by the time I’m 26.’ So I worked towards that, literally trying to scrimp and save. But sometimes those plans don’t go as you expect.
Don’t you find that work, if you love it, is actually really invigorating?
I look at someone’s face and I see the work before I see the person. I personally don’t think people look better when they do it; they just look different.
Working with Martin Scorsese was an absolute minute-by-minute education without him ever being grandiose about it.
Audiences want to see them, and in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.
The more you do it, the more you learn to concentrate, as a child does, incredibly intensively and then you sort of have to relax. I remember the first film I did, the lead actor would in between scenes be reading a newspaper or sleeping and I’d think, ‘How can you do that?’
I’m not particularly interested in playing characters that think the way I do.
I’m not interested in saying what people should and shouldn’t do. It depends on how people feel about themselves. I suppose personally if you do anything out of fear or to mask who you are, then that’s a bit scary. You’ve got to work with what you got...
It’s part of my job. You can’t play Veronica Guerin sounding like this. It just wouldn’t wash. But what I find fascinating about doing an accent – unless it’s a farce – is that it’s not slapped on.
My husband keeps me really honest.
When you’re onstage, you’re acutely aware of the reaction of a particular group of people, because it’s like a wave.