You already feel unsure of yourself, and then you see your worst fears in print. It really knocked me - which is why, I think, I was working, working, working, because I was trying to run away from the fact that I thought I couldn't do it.
I wasn't allowed to do commercials. I wasn't allowed to do TV series. I wasn't allowed to do soaps or basically anything that would mean I missed too much school.
It's good to know that other people think differently, and that's what makes the characters interesting.
I love costume dramas, I love performing in them, because in a funny kind of way, you feel more free. You know about the period, you can read the books, you can see the paintings, but you've never actually going to know what it was like. You can kind of stretch those boundaries a bit.
I've always gravitated towards people who are extreme. Whether its drugs, or kicking down doors. Normally, the people in my life had to escape to get back.
I cook. I go to farmers markets in London and cook really good sort of organic foods.
And we're fortunate if we have parents who are great and loving and inspiring. But, unfortunately, there are people who don't have that.
It's not everyday you get to do a pirate movie, you might as well go for it.
I wish I was Sienna Miller. When I talk to her, I hope a bit of her party personality will rub off on me, but it never does.
I don’t know what happened through the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s that took feminism off the table, that made it something that women weren’t supposed to identify with and were supposed to be ashamed of. Feminism is about the fight for equality between the sexes, with equal respect, equal pay, and equal opportunity. At the moment we are still a long way off that.
It's all about perfection, isn't it?
I tried college for three months but I was desperately unhappy. I just wanted to perform. I was getting straight As but I had no friends and cried every day.
I do think that acting is such an unpredictable job, and you're away a lot. If you're dating somebody outside the industry, it can be hard to understand that.
I like to do the pictures before people get too self-conscious. I like to be spontaneous and get a shot before the subject thinks too much about it.
Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.
I don't quite understand what Tolstoy's actual personal view of Anna is - whether he likes her or hates her, whether she's the heroine or the antiheroine.
The whole point for me is to change as much as possible. If I've done one movie, I've done that, move on.
The thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human. They're full of flaws as much as they are full of heroics. I think the reason that people love them and hate them so much is because, in some way, they always see a mirror of themselves in them, and you can always understand them on some level. Sometimes it's a terrifyingly dark mirror that's held up.
I always find it much easier when there's one person whose vision you're following, as opposed to many people.
Bigger films are more difficult because the number of people is so huge.
Envy is the last thing that my parents feel.
In film as a medium, you're often given a baddie and a goodie and told what to think about them; it's usually a very definite point of view.
I totally agree. I hate knowing too much when I'm going to the cinema and watching as a viewer. I don't want to know that the actor has just gone through a divorce. I don't want to know that the person is an alcoholic. It just gets in the way of my pleasure of watching the character on the screen.
I find it quite difficult on studio films because there are so many different executives and things like that that you have to go through, so very often getting that definitive opinion is actually quite difficult.
You live with a writer [a mother], and you grow up with their words, their kind of fantasies, and I'd pretty much seen every single one of her plays, and been in a lot of rehearsal rooms, so it felt very natural and easy. It was lovely to get an opportunity to do that professionally as well.
