Rachel McAdams

I guess each relationship is different. That’s what I love about relationships. Even when they end, you’ve learned so very much, so much to take into your next relationship and to take into your life. It’s the greatest thing that comes out of an ending – so it depends on the person.

I have a certain curiosity for life that drives me and propels me forward.

I was not popular in high school, I know every actress says that, but really, I was a big geek.

[on the “The Notebook” script] I’m a sucker for those sweeping love stories. When I read the script, I couldn’t stop crying! I just had such a powerful, instantaneous reaction – it was written so well.

A friend of mine had this great theory about the “Teletubbies”, that it’s preparing us for being mindless. And getting us ready for living in an underground world. When they build the underground world because we can no longer breathe the air that it will look like Teletubbie land.

I want to work with great directors and try not to put too much pressure on myself and just read things for the story and recognize when I’m drawn to something for the right reasons and try to maintain some sanity.

We need to stop talking about whether women are funny. And we need to acknowledge that black people are funnier than white people. Let’s discuss that.

Dictionary.com defines ‘Amy Poehler’ as ‘results not found. I take that as a testament to your uniqueness.’

One failed attempt at a shoe bomb and we all take off our shoes at the airport. Thirty-one school shootings since Columbine and no change in our regulation of guns.

No person who does not reside in Canada shall induce electors to vote for or refrain from voting for a particular candidate. And apparently anyone found guilty of doing that could be fined up to $5,000, given a six-month jail term, or both. That is a ridiculous law and I guess what you’re saying, Canada, is do you wanna dance?.

Now they’re getting so politically correct you can’t even stick your tongue out at somebody.

It would be great to see somebody like Kid Rock kissing a man. But I’m sure that he wouldn’t like the prospect of it put to him, and I won’t even go there with Eminem.

I am now determined to do really weird parts but I think I overdo it in auditions so nobody really trusts me!

In the last series, we set up a church [to expose televangelists and the ease of avoiding tax through establishing a religious organisation]. It took a lot of legal advice and months of gathering correspondence with one pastor. In terms of the UK, I’m not sure what the Inland Revenue’s position on churches is. The IRS is very much of the opinion that all churches, whatever their form, operate tax free. How would I make sense of what we achieved? We achieved nothing! We achieved $70,000 in single [donations], a four-foot wooden penis and five vials of human sperm. Although a lot of people would consider that a decent year’s work, I suppose. It’s a pretty impressive room full of tat.

His (Freddie Mercury) words got better quickly. There were some very overt lyrics. Don’t Stop Me Now is a good example. He was having a good time, and that was very much a cri de coeur. Some lyrics we wrote together like I’m Going Slightly Mad, which was funny. We had fun coming up with daft things, all those ridiculous phrases. I’d say it was Freddie’s actual musicality which was the cleverest thing of all, the notes, and his harmonic structure was quite brilliant. When he wrote The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, on the second album, he was crossing sections of six-part harmonies, and I thought: “Bloody hell, that is tricky stuff.” Then there’s The March Of The Black Queen, which is almost like prog-rock, and so outrageously complicated that I can’t even remember the arrangement myself. When you write songs that complex, you have to work hard at it, and it did invoke a lot of head-scratching. But then he’d come up with Killer Queen or, later on, lots of simple things like Crazy Little Thing. He had it on all sides. Freddie evolved. I always called him ‘the man who invented himself’. I think the talent was innate, but he dug deep inside himself and forced it out. His determination was quite something.

Whatever the occasion, [the Queen] has a face which demonstrably says ‘I don’t give a royal s**t.’

2016… falls well below my standards of quality!

A lot of them also looked a little further down the line in the future than we did. We always did everything out of Level Cross (N.C.) in the backyard and we were fairly successful with the thing. Then it started being a bigger and bigger business. It started going and bringing more people in, more money, more technology, that kind of stuff. We still sat there in the backyard. By the time we got ready to do something about it, we were so far behind on our money and our engineering and all that stuff it’s just taken us a little time to get going.

[On being criticized after admitting she and then-husband Ryan Phillippe have gone to couples therapy] Since when is self-improvement a negative? Why wouldn’t I be interested in psychology? I like to read a lot of psychology books. I’m obsessed with child behavior; I would love to be a child psychologist.

[On struggling to be taken seriously in the industry] Even now, people want to marginalize me. They want to attribute all my success to teenagers seeing my movies. I really resent it when people say, “It’s just a genre film; it’s a teen comedy.” It takes a lot of work to make these things have heart and resonance so they’re not just empty, disposable confections. But I don’t give a damn about other people’s perceptions, because I’ll show them. For women in this business, ascendancy is always a battle. It’s scrape and claw. I just try to stick to my guns and respect myself. I want to take the ingenues aside and say, “Value yourself! It’s O.K. if you have opinions!

I don’t take gifts from perfect strangers-but then, nobody is perfect.