I’ve always been a strong feminist and felt that the image of models was detrimental to women. That whole thing really bothered me. I would think about quitting about once a week.
I like being in love, but loving is what is crucial to me. Loving is the reason to live.
You can’t ignore the system and the power you acquire as an actor if you’re in films that are successful.
Once you get into your stride, the camera becomes like another person in the room. It’s like being in a very small theatre where there is no getting away with anything because the audience is centimetres away from you.
I do get funny people sometimes coming up to me in supermarkets in America with my picture in their pocket, which is a bit strange.
I grew up in a strongly socialist family. While I was at school, I worked in party politics and with organizations like the Anti-Nazi League. Everywhere I saw it, I fought prejudice.
I’ll always take Scrabble and chess if I’m going filming. But I do have the Scrabble dictionary, which can be infuriating for other players.
I had a happier experience of the city as an actress than I had had as a model.
Having spent a number of my younger years with trade-union parents attending NUT annual conferences, I feel comfortable with an agenda in my hand and a procedural format for debate.
I play the guitar. This year at the Sundance film festival, I joined the band from ‘The Guitar’ on stage. We warmed up for Patti Smith, and then the director Michel Gondry got on the drums to play some songs from the soundtrack to his film Be Kind Rewind with Mos Def. It was pretty mad.
For a woman to say she has had a dalliance with another woman is quite trendy these days. I do not like trendiness. Life isn’t about dalliances – it’s about individuals. You come across people in your life that you find very interesting. It’s not about something flighty.
Location work has its charms, and can seem glamorous on the outside, but I think living at home and having the stability of a home life once you’ve finished work is very underrated!
Part of me misses the days when we have four channels in England and we were all talking about everything all the time.
I don’t always want a big meal after work – just some crisps and wine!
I think politics can no longer be assigned to parliamentary activity and it probably never could be. But politics with a small p and the history of trade union movement really interests me.
I have seen the Gore documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ just released in the States, and admired the acutely revolutionary delivery of the slideshow assisted talk he has now been giving for some 16 years.
I like working on stage because there’s something very immediate about it, that interaction with an audience where you immediately hear their reaction, or feel them, whether they’re with you.
It’s always a help when you have worked with someone as you’ve got to know them a bit already.
What am I doing in this silly showbiz life? I do wonder that sometimes.
When your life is as precious as all our lives are, then it needs to be kept precious and looked after and treated well. And that is not something we should be sharing with a wider audience.
When I was little it was a great time for film-making, with stuff like Mike Nichols’ ‘Silkwood.’ The films you see in that pre-secondary-school stage stay with you in a very particular way.
When I was a child I wanted to be a petrol pump attendant. I suppose you have all sorts of thoughts as a child and at the time I figured that it was a way to avoid doing anything like going on stage.
My parents were political, so it’s definitely in my bones. Wherever I am, I always seem to get involved with politics. I think, once it’s in your bloodstream, it’s always there. I love it.
It helps being from somewhere other than Hollywood, not having grown up with that sense of film-making. I really wasn’t exposed to that as a young woman.
In orthodox film-making, you never shoot sequentially – but with improv, obviously every move you make has a knock-on effect; it is a cumulative process. I have improvised, on the non-scripted ‘Timecode.’ It can become entirely indulgent: actors smashing crockery and competing verbally.
