Rachel McAdams

Nudity for fictional characters is as normal and mundane as eating breakfast. What bothers me is our culture’s obsession with nudity. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is. I think this overemphasis with nudity makes actors nervous. There’s the worry about seeing one’s body dissected, misrepresented, played and replayed on YouTube.

As strange as movie making is, doing love scenes for the first time with someone you’ve never even said hello to does work in terms of having a fresh quality to a relationship.

I guess you have to be really open to your acting partners and believe in the story.

It takes a lot of time, commitment and a choice. I’ve chosen this path, but it’s not to say I’m not open to love or whatever comes my way. You never close doors.

The craziest thing I’ve ever done to get a guy’s attention? I admit I stalked someone. I showed up at a restaurant where I knew the guy worked, and we were actually good friends and had lost touch, and I pretended that I didn’t know he worked there. And then ran into him and, “Oh my God, you work here? I had no idea.” It’s the most manipulative thing I’ve done in my entire life, but it all worked out very well, so I have no regrets.

I’ve discovered as I’ve grown up that life is far more complicated than you think it is when you’re a kid. It isn’t just a straight-forward fairytale.

[To a psychedelic rock sextet call Strawberry Alarm Clock] We’re going to get you six Ed Sullivan shows and we’re going to get you on Janis Joplin’s next tour. [After the meeting on being told by Schiffman ‘David, what are you doing? Six Ed Sullivan shows? Are you kidding? Janis Joplin wouldn’t piss on these people! We are not going to give them any Janis Joplin dates’] If they have another hit, we’ll get them one Ed Sullivan show, and we’ll get them a couple of dates on somebody else’s tour. I don’t care. And if they don’t have another hit, well, f*ck ’em.

If you have paparazzi, you know you’ve gotten somewhere.

Please welcome the woman I have been assigned to mentor – Lindsay Lohan.

Guys act strange around me. I swear I don’t know why!

Los Angeles makes you feel ugly. I’m not going to pretend I haven’t secretly wanted to be super-skinny, because all girls do.But I have a woman’s body, not a boy’s body. Most women do and should feel proud of their butts and their breasts and their bellies.’

I still like to get carried away – but passively.

My little cousin tells me I look like Magneto so I guess that’s who I should probably play.

Gravity is nominated for best film. It’s the story of how George Clooney would rather float away into space and die than spend one more minute with a woman his own age.

I spent a long time trying to figure out how to play (Edward’s part) without making a fool out of myself. The whole book is written from Bella’s perspective and she’s in love with him. I mean, the guy can be anybody – he could be an alien – and you see past everything if you’re in love with someone.

I’m a bit of a P.T. Barnum. I make stars out of everyone.

This is just to get the kids ready to play. It’s not about the score of the games. We want the boys to learn what they can from this. It helps the coaches see where we’re at and what we need to be working on.

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

I don’t drink, I don’t take drugs, I don’t smoke.

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.

Do you know how much hate mail I’ve gotten from people who love Mario Kart? … In one day, I managed to ruin half of America’s childhood and mushroom farming everywhere.