I want people to think I'm sexy, but to know also that I've got an ordinary body and not feel intimidated.
— Romola Garai
I try not to live in the future too much; that can make you crazy as an actor. There are so many people who are obsessed about their career path, like it's something which you can control, which fundamentally you can't.
I've done a few costume dramas, and people say, 'What was it like wearing the costumes? Did they really help you with your character?,' and most of the time it doesn't make any difference. You're wearing something a bit weird, and it's sort of uncomfortable, but it doesn't really have a huge impact on the part that you're playing.
I love my home, spend as much time in London as I can, and try wherever possible to avoid travelling for work. Sometimes I think I'm really badly equipped to be an actress.
I was brought up with a very strong sense of what can happen if your society starts to chip away at the small victories women have won for themselves.
Increasingly, it's actresses doing the big fashion advertising campaigns, and now there's no distinction between actresses and models.
Postwar Europe was morally stagnant, and there was a lot of neo-conservatism.
There are people who you see on screen and think, 'Wow, that's a slim person,' and in the flesh they look nearly dead.
There's nothing very interesting about my life.
Normally, when you're working on something, there are other characters that you have alliances with, and you have unified goals with some characters.
I've always scribbled, and I still do it. I've written numerous scripts for films for which I think I'd be perfect as the complex, intelligent and, yes, modern heroine. Embarrassingly bad, all of them. I've had to come to terms with the fact that I'm not a writer.
I'm a feminist. God, yes! A bra-burning, building-burning feminist.
I think one of the reasons I've done so much period work is because I feel so depressed by how society chooses to represent women in contemporary work.
Acting is a strange job because your control is very limited.
As a kid, I really loved 'Jane Eyre,' I used to fantasise that the past was so much better and my lifetime was crap.
I love science fiction. I read a lot of science fiction.
I'd actually really love to review books and films and plays, but you can't be an artist and a critic. I would love it if I could.
I can't spend the rest of my life being pretty in a bonnet.
There's no way I could ring up a company that was lending me a red-carpet dress and say, 'Do you have it in a 10?' Because all the press samples are an 8 - I would say a 'small 8.'
I can only do something that my sister or my daughter, if I have one, could watch and feel positive about.
