I think people get confused: people think 'strong female characters' mean you need to play an action figure.
'Diary of a Teenage Girl' was my first American movie. It was my first movie in an American accent. It's based on a graphic novel, which was written in 2002 by someone called Phoebe Gloeckner. It was turned into a play by Marielle Heller, who then wrote it as a screenplay for Sundance Labs.
If you're doing something like 'Arcadia' by Tom Stoppard, which has been done millions and millions of times, and it's been played some unbelievably well-respected actors, there's a lot more pressure there. But I try not to think about all the other people who have done it before me. You've got to try and be original.
I think that Hollywood misconstrues actresses saying, 'Oh I wanna play a strong female character,' like we all want to play, like, superheroes or something.
I was quite academic, quite geeky when I was a kid. I was more interested in going to school than I was in becoming a film star or something.
I was doing one of my first plays at the Royal Court, and Matt LeBlanc came to see the play. He came backstage afterwards, and I couldn't speak. I kept trying to, but no words came out. I just kept thinking, 'That's Joey from 'Friends.' That's actual Joey from 'Friends!'' It was so embarrassing!
It sounds so negative of me to say, but I don't feel like there were many coming-of-age films when I was growing up. I think that when I was a teenager, I felt really misrepresented in the teenage roles that I was watching onscreen. Especially in women.
I grew up with my parents in the kitchen discussing the audition my dad had that day or moaning about something or other in the industry, so it was unglamourised and normalised for me from a very young age.
We try to push such crazy ideals onto young women: the Hollywood version of what they should look like, what they should do, and the kind of Prince Charming they should be looking for. We should just be proud of who we are, because we can't be anybody else. So what's the point of trying?
I want to play a range, from victims to strong people, just as long as it's a well-rounded character. And it's not a woman who's just there for the purpose of the man.
I feel like all teenagers can relate to that feeling of being, like, so highly strung, and everything is so on the surface, and everything is so extreme.
I had a place to go to university; I was going to study history. I was in New York doing 'Arcadia,' and I suddenly thought, 'It feels a bit weird to go from a New York stage to Manchester University.' It didn't quite feel right.
The movies I used to watch, I remember always being so angry because I felt like I, as a teenage girl, was never truly represented in a film. There were always bits of me that were represented - I'd watch 'Juno' and be like, 'Oh, well part of me is like that, but it's still not the whole thing.'
When I was young, there weren't any teenage girls I could relate to in film. They were all put in boxes: the virginal good girl, the really sarcastic asexual one. I wanted to do something that represented how I felt then.
