It's exciting to be with really, really good people. Some people make you feel like you've got to up your game. Working with good people is always good.
For example, Americans seem reluctant to take on Shakespeare because you don't think you're very good at it - which is rubbish. You're missing out here.
If you are a cabaret artist and you are mostly singing other people's songs, you're asking them to rethink a song, listen to it in a different way. The most impact you can have while asking them to re-listen to a song is if it's a song they know very well.
The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.
Finally, the scariest thing about abuse of any shape or form, is, in my opinion, not the abuse itself, but that if it continues it can begin to feel commonplace and eventually acceptable.
Nowadays people don't know how to handle it if all the ends aren't tied up and they're not told what to think in films. And if they're challenged, they think it's something wrong with the film.
When you're on TV, you come into people's homes. In theater and film, they go to you - to the temple of the cinema or theater. And it's very different.
If the president of the country is not actually saying something, allowing equality to happen, how could you expect to counsel kids not to bully other kids? If they're not seeing that their society sees gay people as equals, how could you tell them what they're doing is wrong? With all this stuff going on, with the "Don't ask, don't tell" and things like that, we are second-class citizens, definitely. It just seems to me that it's hypocritical for us as a culture to say, "Bullying is a terrible thing," when really, they are just reflecting what the society is doing.
Actors aren't stupid, mostly, and if there's a sensibility and an aesthetic that a director's going for, if you're aware of that too, you can do things to help that.
I wouldn't do my roles if I really hated it. I've done things I hated, but I didn't go into them thinking I would hate them. I want to have fun. I don't want to go to work and not enjoy it. So if I'm swirling around on some wires, talking to Fred Flintstone, I make it the funnest I can. I also want to be good at it. I don't want to be a crap cartoon character. I want to be proud I'm a vitamin!
I'd been depressed before, of course. But I'm talking about really depressed. Not just feeling a bit down or sad, a depression that has something to do with biorhythms. I'm talking about the kind of depressed that floats in upon you like a fog. You can feel it coming and you can see where it is going to take you but you are powerless, utterly powerless to stop it. I know now.