Rachael Stirling

“My instinct is to surround myself with the company of wise, witty, wonderful women, and I have a great bank of female friends of all ages.”

“I remember I went to audition for the first Daniel Craig Bond film, 'Casino Royale.' I was there in this Versace dress, and I remember looking in the mirror, and I couldn't have felt less like a Bond girl if I tried.”

“I fell upon Jenny Saville's work and loved these great big pieces she was painting, celebrating all things flesh and woman, and with great big Simone Beauvoir quotations written in mirror writing so you had to look at yourself in the pictures to read them.”

“When you're on the verge of depression, a good leveller is to put one foot in front of the other and do some manual labour.”

“I teach kids to read on a Saturday for this charity called Real Action. It's a voluntary school because lots of the kids around my area of London are from immigrant families and need extra help with reading.”

“I'm not really Bond girl material, and that's fine by me. I'm a grafter; I'm not a star.”

“When going out on a date, I think there are certain old-fashioned manners that I still enjoy. I don't mean that as an anti-feminist comment. I just mean it as a pro-women comment. There must be a place for us to exist and our differences to exist without one taking away from the other.”

“I had been kind of quite porky and happy at boarding school and not self-conscious at all; then, suddenly, I found myself in auditions being examined, and it made me angry.”

“I have never met anybody who likes 'The Detectorists' that I don't like.”

“I want to be around when I'm 60; I don't want to be some flash in the pan.”

“My mum was working in London, so I went to school there until I was 12. But every holiday would be in Scotland, and when I went to boarding school, I'd either be there or Scotland.”

“I was always drawn to standing up in front of people.”

“I find the idea that some kids go into acting because of their parents butt-clenchingly embarrassing. I've gone out of my way to prove myself as a separate being. I don't want to be seen as a subset of someone else.”

“If you aren't hot in Hollywood, you feel like you're in Siberia.”

“I eat healthily, I do ballet and exercise, and I'm toned and tight, but I take up space, and I don't aspire to anorexia.”

“I didn't grow up or learn how to fully serve myself until I got my head down in the theatre.”

“If I'd been an actor in the 1940s, I would have been in fashion.”

“I want the kind of feminism that allows me to have a voice and to compete on equal terms with men yet still, potentially, to have one of them hurl me over their shoulder and carry me off somewhere, because I still find proper, old-fashioned masculinity deeply attractive.”

“I like cake, I swear a lot, and I hardly ever go to the hairdresser. I don't think I'm a movie star.”

“Scotland was home to me from when I was 12 up until I was 22. I decided to drop my English bit, and when anyone asked where I came from, I always said Scotland. It really shaped the fibres of my being.”