Quotes from Romola Garai

The last thing a director needs is an actress who feels an ownership towards a particular character.

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

I wish I was a more adventurous person in a way. But actually, security is a really big deal for me.

I am always naturally drawn to heroines that have human flaws because I enjoy people that have lived their life with courage and make big successes and big failures.

I just don't believe you're capable of being an actor unless you have a desire to experience your emotions in a public way.

I think with the best actors, emotion is something that has no kind of check in them.

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

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

Someone like David Tennant is able to embrace people's love for 'Doctor Who' in a totally positive way. I have huge admiration for people who are able to do that.

I get nonplussed by all the Fifties retro-revival aesthetic. Would we really want to be in our pinnies in our kitchen weeping? I find the kitchen, housewifey aesthetic repugnant.

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.

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

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 can't spend the rest of my life being pretty in a bonnet.

I was 20 years old when, despite mass protests against military action, Iraq was invaded in 2003 - it didn't make for motivated political participation, I can tell you.

I'm a feminist. God, yes! A bra-burning, building-burning feminist.

I feel that it's important to fail now and again. For instance, if I go for a job and I don't get it, that makes me not a better person, but more balanced, more aware of what life is really like.

I think the problem is that there has been a kind of backlash against feminism. I think women just didn't really see themselves winning that fight, and I think that probably led to a lot women feeling trapped in a perpetual cycle of disappointment - trying to be feminists and failing to be.

My main ambitions, really, are in the theatre.

I'd always try to get a C, maybe a B. Other girls would trot off a brilliant essay and go off to Oxford; I'd think: 'Where is the justice?' I took A-levels in English, history and theatre studies and got three Bs.

There was quite a lot of lying around in fields at Stonar, a small independent girls' school in the country near Bath. It was a non-selective school and the right environment for me: academically not particularly pushy.

I realise there's an innate paradox in promoting oneself on the one hand and saying, 'Oh, I don't want to be famous,' on the other.

The point of being a movie star is that people cast you in a role. Actors tie themselves in knots trying to get out of that.