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Quotes
 Filming
Pride & Prejudice was a joy and made for one of my happiest summers
ever. "It could well be that the story brings out the best in
people - and it sounds so cheesy, but we really did behave like a
family. The girls playing the younger sisters had never been on a film
set before and wanted to socialize all the time, so we picnicked, hung
out in a beautiful country house and went swimming naked in a lake. It
was idyllic.
I
think, you know, as an actor we get
these terribly sort of pretentious ideas in our heads. We try to take
everything very seriously at first, you know, until we lighten up, we
get onboard, and have a laugh. But I thought if I’m going to be
cutting up monsters, I want to know that I look like I know what I’m
doing. So I took myself off to the Prague Medical School and studied
human dissection. I mean, why?
I
don't think RADA wanted me, actually. When I was at Oxford I had a
boyfriend at Central [School of Speech and Drama] and it looked like the
most fantastic life, but I think not going makes you more free. Nothing
can teach you what it's like to work on a film set, and the best
education there can be for an actor is to walk up the street and observe
human nature.
It
was different. It’s not where you feel your sexiest, I have to say,
even surrounded by a tribe of Marines, which is a pretty good position
to find yourself in.
When
you're dressed up like Miranda Frost, people assume you have a similar
character, but I was 21 and quaking inside.
The
job of an actor is the same in all of them, really. I mean, you’re
just creating a character that you hope people will believe, so it
doesn’t make that much of a difference really.
I
think you can make a choice with that kind of thing. You can certainly
keep a low public profile if you want to. Ideally, I'd like to be living
in upstate New York, in a house that I could renovate and fill with
books and clothes, while being offered the kind of parts that are
currently going to Kate
Winslet and Nicole
Kidman.
Well
I think we’ve harnessed a good story to it. If I’m honest, people
aren’t watching it for the story. They’re watching it for the guns,
for the action, for the boys, for everything else. But if you do get
dragged along with your boyfriend, then there is a good story in there.
I think it tells a story that does tap into our primal fears about
science and the way science is going and genetic engineering going
wrong.
It's
terrifying. The first day was with Judi Dench, who has been one of my
lifelong heroes, really. Everybody said, "That'll be lovely, she's
so lovely, that'll be fantastic," but it was terrifying, absolutely
terrifying.
People
don't give you credit for nerves when you're done up to look completely
sophisticated and cool. It's funny, it has a funny effect on people,
because people, however much they don't want to equate you with a
character, they kind of do.
In
terms of that, I was feeling like I was learning to swim, and they
thought I was casually treading water. It wasn't easy, ever. I was
nervous, really, for six months, coming and going, but maybe the best
scenes come out of the ones you're most nervous in.
I
always feel a responsibility towards these things, not to dispel myths,
but when you do a love scene you tend to wear what they call 'modesty
panels'. They use tape to tape these things to you, and Pierce and I
have this scene where we're in this ice swan and there were a lot of
furs around.
We
pulled away after the scene and I looked down to check the tapes and
there were these hairs sticking out. I thought, "Oh my God, I'm
pulling off Pierce's chest hair!" And then, of course, I realised
it was just the kind of teddy bear fur they'd used for the blankets. I
was trying to make sure he didn't see.
I
think it's OK to play to your strengths, and if I have a quality of
Englishness that people like, I won't hide that. I'm probably not going
to play a junkie and that's OK because there are other people who will
do it better. A view that's been held for a long time is that the best
way to prove oneself as an actor is to play the grittiest roles out
there. I don't agree with that.
It's
amazing. It was funny being with [director] Lee Tamahori that day,
because he didn't often talk to us or use our names very much, he was so
in the world that he'd talk about Graves and Bond and Miranda.
But
I tell you, when it was Madonna,
it was, "Madonna,
do this. Madonna,
can you come over here?" It's only once in a life you get to boss
somebody like that about. It's just so funny, though, to see a face that
you know so well, and to see it close up.
You
have to kind of condense all of those graphic and amazing and iconic
images into one woman's face. Madonna wrote the soundtrack of our
growing up, I think she's fantastic. We didn't know if she was going to
turn up, and she was dead professional and quite fun really and, I
guess, nervous.
I'd
love to say I was the kind of person who has an outline. But the only
outline I have is that I want to carry on doing this all my life.
I
think both Halle and my character both play Bond at his own game, which
is what is striking about this film. I think the sexual politics of the
film are quite unusual for a Bond movie, in that they're much more
mutual, they're kind of, you know, people using sex as a weapon - the
girls as well as Bond. |
