Citas

If you act scared, your body produces adrenaline.

I've always had horrible Valentine's Days.

There's always going to be a separate version of you that people will create, and you have no control over it.

One aspect of my mum's personality that has influenced me is her love of Hollywood and the golden era of black-and-white films.

I've never been desperate to please my father.

I don't think that theater is the higher medium, that it's better than film.

I don't like talking about myself, if I'm honest.

I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be an actor. It has just always been an inevitability on some level.

I always look for contradiction in a character.

As a child I loved ghost stories.

I'm very nerdy about my music, and I like interrogating people about what they put on playlists.

I'm not consciously avoiding doing a lot of period drama, but I don't really seek it out either.

I was the kid who grew up watching Bette Davis films.

I was a really pretentious teenager.

I think acting can be very frustrating, and there's no experience that doesn't make you a better actor.

My mum's American. She's from Detroit.

My childhood was very colourful, and I am very good friends with both my parents. We have no secrets.

Lentil dhal is the only thing I can cook.

It sounds trite, but I like telling stories.

I've played an awful lot of repressed people.

I quite enjoy cooking but I'm not consistent. I can't follow the recipe book. If something goes well, I'll never make it again, which is completely stupid. It's a one-shot kind of deal.

You either are a good director or you're not.

When I was 22, I thought I couldn't wear heels because of my height.

Twin Peaks (1990) is my favorite American TV show.

No family is sane, is it?

If pressed, I would say I feel British. It's where I grew up and where I choose to live, the culture that I love, but I feel perfectly at home in America, I don't feel like a tourist or anything.

I would say that maybe directors who act as well are easier with actors. I'm not saying that all directors have this, but sometimes you'll come across a director who sort of looks at an actor a bit like a kind of untrained horse that's been let out of the stable, like they might buck him.

I used to have the most visceral response to having my photo taken. I felt like instantly bursting into tears and running out of the room. I hated all the attention, which is such a stupid thing for an actor to say.

I think for a long time it seemed like working in an art form and being a feminist meant portraying women in a perfect, angelic light. And there's nothing feminist about that.

I read everything. I've always got a book on the go and I'm really nerdy about it, I get through books and don't remember anything about them afterwards. But I read all sorts, from classic to contemporary.

Whenever I'm in theatre situations I will go out of my way not to talk about my father, but in the film world I can be really proud of my family and say, 'You know what: my dad's a really, really famous theatre director,' because nobody has any idea.

To read a character I'm not sympathizing with is generally quite a good, attractive proposition because I've got somewhere to go, I've got work to do, to try to understand why they behave like they behave, to relate entirely and understand them and to be completely emotionally connected. That is much more fun 99 percent of the time.

There are people all over the world who like to write fan letters in the voice of their pet: 'Hello, my name is Fifi and I'm a labrador and I think you're great. Paw paw!'

One of the great things about the "Iron Man" franchise is that they employ fascinating actors who don't necessarily do action movies. Before "Iron Man", you didn't associate Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow with those kinds of films. There's an emphasis on repartee and wit.

[on meeting Benedict Cumberbatch when she was age 8] Benedict was one of those boys that you met and you could already see what he was going to be like when he was middle-aged. He is a one-off, and it is the fate of people who are unique for others not to notice their talent straight off the bat. It's easy for people to say, "Wow, you are the next 'Johnny Depp'." Benedict was never going to be the next anybody. He was always going to be just who he is.