Robbie Williams

I come from the tradition of a big Irish family that loves to sing. I love to perform.

The thing about drugs and sex is that you lose all your inhibitions. I’ve had sex in trains, planes, wine bars… and quite a few car parks!

I’ve never, ever, raised a fist to anybody in my life.

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.

With the war and everything that’s going on, unless you’re Susan Sarandon, the best route is to keep your mouth shut. For me it is, anyway!

I’ve deliberately tried to calm myself down because eventually I want to be a good role model to my kids.

I’m a bit hesitant to do anything because I’m actually kind of lazy and I’d like an easier life from now on. The world’s a massive place with lots of early mornings and late starts when you’re working.

What good are fans? You can’t eat applause for breakfast. You can’t sleep with it.

I’ve never felt uncomfortable with my level of fame. I don’t get hassled. Maybe sometimes in a minor way, but New Yorkers are much too cool for that. The thing is, you choose to be an actress, but not to be a celebrity.

That night’s show was watched by ten million people, so I guess that director at The Second City who said the audience “didn’t want to see a sketch with two women” can go shit in his hat.

People think clowns – I wasn’t a clown. I would run parties. I basically ran around for two hours and ate massive piles of Haribo.

[on Brad Pitt] I don’t know… I guess…. he’s a nice person and a GOOD kisser!

Being a sex symbol was rather like being a convict.

[on Trump lying] They are self-serving half-truths from a self-serving half-man who has somehow convinced half the country that sacrifice is the same thing as success.

I’m just chatty. But I do express my opinion.

[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!

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.

The only thing that I’m scared of is not livin’ up to the expectations of Dr. Dre and Eminem.

There are always going to be ridiculous rumors.

Last year in L.A. county 150 out of 151 incumbents ran unopposed. And come on. They could at least go through the motions of pretending there was another candidate. Just throw a robe on a pelican and tape a gavel to his wing. Or – I’ll tell you what – you’re in L.A. Just pretend you’re considering Blake Lively for the job. Movie studios do that all the time.

Student debt is like HPV – if you go to college, you are most likely to get it, and it will follow you for the rest of your life.