Rose Byrne

I just want to continue being able to get roles that scare me and make me better and I think I can only grow as an artist if I do things that are scaring me and making me uncomfortable because that’s the only place you’ll learn anything.

I guess you can get to a level where you choose. I guess when you reach that point maybe you start making decisions about whether you want to be a leading man or woman. I’m not at that point at all. Where I am now, you’re very much at everybody else’s mercy. You have no control over your career in a lot of ways. It’s just important to know what your own goals are, because that’s empowering.

I see myself more as a character actress than a celebrity!

[On her most dreadful crush] I used to drive, pretty pathetically, I’d just drive by their house all the time and they didn’t know who I was. I’d just drive by the house all the time. I once knocked on the window and I thought, “What am I doing? What am I going to say if they come to the door and don’t know who I am?”

I’ve had some pretty good experiences on everything, even if the film doesn’t always work.

[on her role in “Star Wars: Episode II”] That was easy, I just stood by Natalie Portman looking very serious.

Even when I was at ‘SNL,’ I didn’t do impersonations. I always wanted to be the kind of person who could do them – I always thought they were the coolest thing on the show – but I didn’t have any experience.

I love old music, old movies, screwball comedies, vintage clothes and basically I’m an old-fashioned gal.

It’s more egalitarian on the Internet – anyone can put anything up. But in terms of the money it takes to allow a band to get good, there’s less of it to invest.

It’s just such a tangled-up issue, the way women present themselves [in comedy]-whether or not they choose to put their thumbs in their panties on the cover of Maxim and judge each other back and forth on it. It’s a complicated issue, and we didn’t go much further on saying anything other than to say, ‘Yeah, it’s a complicated issue and we’re all kind of figuring it out as we go.’

If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’!

I really had to think and learn about musical intervals.

A hundred and thirteen is a lot of tests. It’s approaching the amount that you’d ask your doctor for the morning after you woke up from a one-night stand with Colin Farrell.

There are positive things that come of social media as well as negative.

There’s so much of this beautiful planet that is still actually spectacular and stimulating. There are so many amazing people that you meet along the way. By using my career as the wind in the sails of my adventures, I could see so many things and so many people that I might have missed had my career gone a different direction.

[on the MTV movie awards] Ryan was whispering in my ear as we’re winning the award. He’s like, ‘You go that way, I’ll go this way, and we’ll meet in the middle. I was like, ‘What?!? You better not chicken out or I’ll kill you!’ It was fun.

I do worry – a lot.

News is not a game show. You don’t win a car if you happen to be right.

I think mystery is kind of great. I don’t know anything about Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn or Ava Gardner – not really – and I like that. I love watching their movies because they’re my personal movie stars. I don’t know what they eat and who their trainer is.

We had this bonding week at the begining and I did a lot of improvising with Rupert and he’s really, like hes incredibly funny, but just as a real person, because hes funny in the film obviously, but he can do – he’s like really versatile doing acting, and Emma as well, she can just, she just does it, shes an actress, she always has been and she’s just incredibly intelligent young person.

Thats the worst thing, I dont really care if people say I’m a bad actor, I can like work on that, but if they just say that he’s ugly thats just like “oh.. really?”