“The women I’m attracted to playing I hope will mean something to someone.”

There was one moment when I was in L.A., and he was teaching me a move. I just looked at him, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m being taught to wrestle by Dwayne Johnson. What the hell?’

Amazing, obviously. She’s been my idol since I re-enacted ‘Titanic’ and fell in love with Leo. And it’s a privilege to be called the next anything. But I suppose to be the next you is all you can do.

I grew up in a very loud family where you had to fight to get your voice heard, in a good way.

What we don’t realise when we watch a normal film is how many times someone has run in just before a shot quickly to wipe away that sweaty moustache.

Wearing a corset is extremely uncomfortable.

That, for me, actually is the most important thing about doing a period film is trying to make these people as lovable as they are back then.

As beautiful as cinema is, it’s a massive part of the problem of why we look at ourselves in the way we do.

I think there’s always some good reason to try and modernize most period things, because at the end of the day, they may have,

If you look at it, the corset is a very beautiful item, but when I put one on, I realized how little you could actually move.

During the Me Too breakthrough, I was hanging out with Emma Thompson and Emily Watson – two people I’ve looked up to my entire life. Talking to those women was so empowering.

The Falling’ was a big, flashy, bizarre experience. I kept on saying at the time it was a fluke because I did the audition, and I didn’t think anything would come of it.

I think it’s good to not edit your life too much, or you give people different standards.

I remember being about six years old, for the first day of school, and sitting in the back of a Chrysler, pretending to cry while listening to Tracy Chapman.

I like a face that hasn’t been tampered with.

What’s important is to listen before you react.

The whole wrestling art, it’s a whole form, is performance, and that’s what makes it so exciting to do.

So peace does not mean just putting an end to violence or to war, but to all other factors that threaten peace, such as discrimination, such as inequality, poverty.

Beauty means this to one person, perhaps, and that to the other. And yet when any one of us has seen or heard or read that which to us is beautiful.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.

I don’t think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we’re concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.

No matter who you are, black, white, green, there’s going to be things in your way, you know what I mean?

You can’t allow the forces of political correction to shut you up. I mean, why are people afraid to say, ‘Merry Christmas?’ Give me a break. If people don’t like it, yeah, they can go do something else.

What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.