“In Hud, Paul Newman is a real bastard, but how can you not like this despicable guy? I love seeing someone in a movie who can walk that line: no wrong, no right, no regret, no guilt. I know some people like that, and although I don’t trust them, I respect them. They have the courage and the personal politics to walk through life and say, ‘I am an island. Deal with that.’ There’s a clarity that is attractive.”
“I can’t think of a better love scene than the one in Don’t Look Now. A married couple, Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, are in a Venice hotel room and the movie cuts backwards between them getting dressed after sex and having sex. That scene will haunt your dreams. The sex is fraught. Maybe a great love scene needs to be fraught—in Anna Karenina, we had a choreographer direct the love scenes. They were like dances, which somehow made it easier for me to concentrate on Anna’s emotions. With Vronksy, her lover, she’s like an addict—she probably never had an orgasm before she was with him, and she equates that with love. We all want to be the hero of our own story, of our own great passion, but Anna thought love would allow her to break all the rules.”
“It was much more difficult to do a death scene than a sex scene for Trishna. The sex scenes were disturbing: Trishna is a submissive person, and she is having sex in a submissive way, which is so not me. But I have never died, and I did not want to die in a gimmicky or comical way. It is hard to fake stabbing yourself with great intensity. I was so uncomfortable, I started to laugh.”
“When I did Catch Me If You Can, in 2002, I had a really big crush on Leonardo DiCaprio. I had fixated on him in Growing Pains and in Titanic. I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, if I ever work with Leo, it will be wonderful.’ And then, there I was, with pigtails—looking not at all like Gisele, whom he was dating at the time. I figured my chances were pretty slim, so I just focused on the work.”
“My favorite actress is Gena Rowlands. I love her in the John Cassavetes film Love Streams. She’s estranged from her daughter, and she’s trying to reunite with her by making her laugh. The scene ends with Rowlands doing a backflip off a diving board. There’s something so heartbreaking about her need to connect. I might watch it again now.”
“I had been signed on to On the Road since 2007 or so. I knew I had to audition for the director, Walter Salles. I was waiting for the call, and nothing was really going on in L.A., so I flew to Minnesota, where I’m from, to help my dad on the farm. As soon as I landed, they called and said they wanted to see me in L.A. I flew straight back. That was March ’07. I found out in September, on my birthday, that I’d gotten the part. I was flying from New York, and I landed in Chicago for a layover. My dad called and sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ and I received an e-mail from Salles saying, ‘I have great news for you.’ When I finally landed in L.A., I got a call from Minnesota that my father had had a heart attack after he got off the phone with me. I called him up in the hospital and said, ‘You can’t do this! It’s my birthday! And I just got On the Road!’ As it turned out, he was okay, but it was a weird balance. When there’s a great amount of good, it can be evened out by a great amount of bad.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m drawn to controversy, but I try not to let the fear of controversy get in the way of my decisions. I wasn’t sure I was the right person to play Broomhilda, a slave, in Django. The thing I learned most was the enormous strength it would take any human being to survive the circumstances of slavery, because I barely survived it for pretend. I kept telling Quentin [Tarantino], ‘I’m going to send you my extra therapy bills.’ I was up to twice a week on the phone with my shrink.”
“I grew up in Australia with two sisters, Liberty and Anarchy, and a brother named Riot. All of my family thinks they are funnier than I am. I say to them, ‘When have you done professional comedy? What movies have you been in?’ Um, never and none. In Australia, I’ve been in 13 TV shows, and I also did stand-up. I would tell family secrets onstage. And sometimes I would lie: I said that my father was in prison. That didn’t go down too well with my actual father.”