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My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that's it. I don't tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

I'm a product of a military dictatorship. Under a dictatorship, you cannot trust information or dispense it freely because of censorship. So Brazilians become very flexible in the use of metaphors. They learn to communicate with double meanings.

There aren't a lot of Portuguese models, so everyone always expects me to be Brazilian because of my features, sometimes even American, as I have a slight American accent when I speak English.

I am a writer who has written about the life of my people, the character of my people. What I can say is that the greatest hero of the Brazilian novel is the Brazilian people.

Modeling has given me the opportunity to travel outside of Brazil and see the world. I have been meeting many interesting and talented people along the way.

I mean I tried to transform myself through characters throughout my career.

I work very hard at creating complex characters, a mix of positives and negatives. They are all flawed. I believe flaws are almost universal, and they help us understand, sympathise and, paradoxically, feel closer to such characters.

I get very involved in my characters. Sometimes I have a very hard time separating my characters from my life.

My mom's Brazilian, so she and I definitely grew up with different perspectives. I was born in America, and she's from Brazil, so we have different ways of doing things. There's a bit of culture clash there.

I also try very hard to create characters - both heroes and villains - with psychological depth.