Romola Garai: I live in London and am lucky to have many friends from...

I can only do something that my sister or my daughter, if I have one, could watch and feel positive about.

Romola Garai

daughter my-sister watches

I'm fundamentally a busy person; I spend my time doing useful things and profoundly useless things!

Romola Garai

useless-things useful-things busy

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.

Romola Garai

artist play book

I really like films and plays that cross over different genres. So I'd like to do something that you think is a drama and then you think is a supernatural thing and then becomes a drama again. That's very vague.

Romola Garai

play drama thinking

I've worked with actors who tell everyone what to do in the scene - that makes me go pretty atomic.

Romola Garai

actors scene

If I have to spend prolonged periods of time in a trailer, I go mad. Stuck in a metal box doing nothing, I lie there paralysed with boredom.

Romola Garai

boredom mad lying

If you are an actress in L.A., on your 40th birthday they should just hand you the keys to the lunatic asylum.

Romola Garai

actresses keys hands

I think it is kind of important to direct someone so the character is appealing, but, as an actress, I find it frustrating because I think, "Why do I have to be more likable than a man would have to be saying the same line?"

Romola Garai

character men thinking

Nowadays, most women just assume they have a right to be in the workplace, and any kind of discrimination they suffer is sort of more creeping.

Romola Garai

discrimination assuming suffering

Our conception of 1950s underwear is a lovely vintage aesthetic, but actually, wearing stockings with no elastic and a girdle was heavy duty.

Romola Garai

underwear vintage lovely

The worst thing you can do as a performer is to judge your character in any way, positively or negatively.

Romola Garai

judging character way

If you're going to make great art, you have to make it at a huge cost - you have to be prepared to sacrifice what other people think of you, other people's opinions, and you have to make personal sacrifices.

Romola Garai

sacrifice art thinking

The language of freedom-fighting was so co-opted by the baby boomers in order to express their now-hopelessly compromised ideologies that no other generation could emulate it without a smirk. This has created an apathetic generation in the West, with young people no longer distinguishing between the old order and the new.

Romola Garai

fighting baby order

When you talk to women who were working as print journalists or in broadcasting in the '50s, and then you talk to women who were working in the late '60s, there's an enormous difference. There had already been a huge transition. Then, of course, you get well into the '70s and there were women with children working.

Romola Garai

get-well differences children

Normally, when youre working on something, there are other characters that you have alliances with, and you have unified goals with some characters.

Romola Garai

alliances goal character

I love the theatre and I love working in the theatre but I'm a big cinefile and I love the movies. I also do scribble but to limited success! I think I find being in a room on my own quite hard, which I think a lot of actors do because what we do is so inter-active. It's a very supportive profession... despite its reputation for being highly competitive it's actually one of the most collaborative professions you can do in the arts because you're always working in a team.

Romola Garai

team art thinking

My alter egos have changed a lot over the years. When I was a child, I was a black horse called Storm. Whinnying and jumping over bamboo poles in the garden took up pretty much my entire childhood.

Romola Garai

horse garden children

I would love to live free of the fear and sadness and real desperation that I think the effect of childbirth has on women, especially because we are expected to be so concerned by recovery from childbirth.

Romola Garai

recovery sadness real

I would argue that something dark is lurking between the sexes, and that it is seeping out into cinema.

Romola Garai

cinema dark sex

Your desire to please... actors are people pleasers and if somebody says your vocal choice in this was ridiculous or whatever you will come back and do it differently. So, to avoid getting into a situation where you're altering your performance way down the line you have to just not do it at all. It's hard and I have done it in the past to disastrous consequences!

Romola Garai

choices people past

I live in London and am lucky to have many friends from school, university and work who are from diverse backgrounds. Some of my closest friends are the children of refugees and I have always been fascinated by their stories and the struggle of how they came to the UK and assimilated into society.