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My whole career has been fulfilling my childhood fantasies, playing characters that are larger than life, getting to play a knight, an elf, a prince, and a soldier.

I like characters who are larger-than-life, whether life-loving women or the artist or guru who grabs everything. But I don't live among people like that.

I raised two sons, and I know that even though they're bigger and stronger than I am, they're still little boys inside. They still cry, they still hurt. So whenever I write a male character, no matter how 'heroic' he may be, I think of my sons. And I remember that every man was once a little boy.

I'm a big believer in the notion that our greatest potential lies in our darkest parts. To a certain extent it's only in facing those parts of ourselves that we can truly grow, and I think that's true of all of the characters I've played, certainly in the past few years.

I definitely had very strong male figures in my life, who, when I look back, clearly laid the foundations to who I am.

Stripping away artifice - it's the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life - but there's nothing bigger than life.

I'm a massive daydreamer. I'm constantly lost within my own fantasies and my own thoughts personally, and I think maybe that is sort of represented in what we do for a living, the fact that we make believe everything and we escape into these other characters for a living.

I've always been full-figured in a not-boyish way.

With a face like mine, I'm never going to play a character who conquers the universe, I'm going to play characters who are subject to forces bearing down on them. My career's based on how we are rather than how we wish we were - they get the good-looking boys in for that kind of role.

I'm in the trenches; I do the best work I can always do. Having said that, the way that what I do converges with the outside world is fascinating to me. Because it ebbs and flows. People's interest and understanding, it changes all the time.