Quotes

I don't feel like I've hit my stride. So I wonder what the moment will be when I get to be who I want to be.

It doesn't necessarily matter what your answer is to the question: What is art? So long as you have one.

I didn't know much about video games. There are some awfully violent ones. But Heavenly Sword (2007) is different. I've had huge conversations with a friend who made it. I think what he wants to do is to make the player care. Yes, there's killing. But the character I play in "Heavenly Sword", "Nariko", is ultimately protecting her family and this runaway girl. It's a beautiful game. It's beyond a video game. The landscape is to protect and to care. My friend is working toward a world where you get an emotion out of the people who are playing it. See if you can make them cry if they couldn't save the people who they were trying to protect. This isn't "Pac-Man".

Sometimes there will be a line in the script and I just can't imagine saying it. I'll ask an American and they'll say, "Oh, yeah. That's how we say it." We just say things differently in Australia - like torch. I'd ask, "Can I have the torch?" It seems to fall flat when I say, "Can I have the flashlight?"

That sex scene in The Pacific (2010)? You don't get that on Fringe (2008), do you? I don't think anyone finds them easy. It's not that I'm embarrassed about my boobs. It's just that some part of you really doesn't want that out there. At the same time, you want to get good at it. In the moment, what you're really thinking is, Shit, I need a mint.

[on who inspires her as an actor]: I just adore Kate Winslet. I love her because you're never aware of all the stuff that's going into her characterization and, yet, she completely transforms. She also has this incandescent warmth to her, and that's a quality that is hers. She's approachable and damn believable.

[on having to impersonate Leonard Nimoy on Fringe (2008)]: I was not excited when that script came out. I was fearful. So what do you do? You call the people that are much better than you and say, "Help!" [Laughs] John [Noble] had worked with Leonard, plus I was so, so nervous, I wanted to make sure that, when I went to the set to do it for the first time, there was at least one person that I could look at who I had done it with before and trusted. It offered an element of comfort... I got an email saying, "I've been hearing good things about your impersonation of me". I wrote back, "Oh gosh, I'm so sorry. Why they didn't give it to Josh [Jackson] or John [Noble], I don't know". He was so darling, he wrote back, "It wouldn't have been as charming".

I am always in a better mood playing the 'alternate' Olivia. When there's less responsibility life's kind of cool.