Rachel Weisz

When I’m playing a character, I use the American accent. But when I go back to England, I just glide right back into Englishness immediately. Every actor uses a dialect coach. Every actor, and if they say they don’t, they’re lying. Everybody does, yeah. You don’t want to worry about it. You have someone listening out to check that you’re not straying.

You have to be quite stupid to act.

Working with someone like Dustin Hoffman is a huge honor and, after you kind of get through that, you’re frightened about working with a screen legend, and I was just in awe.

This is my first marriage. Beforehand, I was living in sin.

I was advised by an American agent when I was about 19 to change my surname.

I moved to New York last year and I love it. It’s a huge change and I’ve always wanted to spend time there. It’s like a more intense London, and everything’s up a few notches. The lights are brighter, the pace is faster and the food’s better.

Well, my sort of stability as a character, it’s never been one of my strongest attributes. I’m a bit of a clusterf*ck. I get so many great ideas that I kind of mesmerize people with another plan before the previous plan is hatched out; people run away, pull their hair off, go off in different directions, nodding their heads, and going, “Oh, god”.

[on which film had a bigger impact on her career – “The Notebook” or “Mean Girls”] For me personally it would be The Notebook. That was something I was dying to do when I read the script. I worked with so many amazing people and people responded so well to that film, and continue to. In terms of an impact on my career, that was significant. Mean Girls speaks to a really large audience, which is the kids and they eat that stuff up. I don’t know. It’s hard to choose.

I’ve been working so hard, I’m about to have a Mariah Carey.

Most of the time, people will just pass me by, or if they do realize, they’ll say something like, “My girlfriend said that was you, but I didn’t believe her.”

But contrary to what some people seem to think, I was never a bully. I was just a hard man.

I can’t tell you an answer to that (question on the meaning of life). I can just say live it, be kind, do your best, don’t hurt anybody, and don’t fake orgasms. From a man’s viewpoint, that’s pretty impossible.

All I can do is take influences from where I was raised.

You can never say you’re big – I don’t think you can ever take anything like that for granted.

My younger sister and I had the same modeling agency.

No one wants to quit when he’s losing and no one wants to quit when he’s winning.

I like listening to good music – and I can’t stop playing my album.

It’s a lot harder to do an ensemble because your energy is going in so many different places, and you have to cover everybody. You have to sort of split your attention.

I don’t like Tommy on Broadway at all. I like the music, I’m pleased with Pete’s success but I don’t like what they’ve done to it.

[asked about the ways she is discriminated against] I get discriminated against in three ways: I get discriminated against because I’m blond, I get discriminated against because I’m an actress and I get discriminated against because I’m from the South.

[on animals] When I see a toreador in a bullfight getting gored I think: ‘Good, you shouldn’t be in there’. What is the pleasure in seeing an animal speared to death? It’s the same with fox hunting. They’re just psychopaths. I think I’ll end up doing something with animals – running a sanctuary or something.