There's a certain amount of pressure that comes from playing real people. It's a pressure to deliver something fair and right to the real person and any living relatives. But generally, it's a joy, as you get to target your interest on a particular era.

Broadway is the actor's Mt. Everest - but with more flattering frocks.

I knew who Jackie Kennedy was in terms of being the wife of JFK and being a clothes horse, and I knew that she later married Onassis, but I had a very, very vague idea of who he was.

Anne Boleyn is certainly the most exciting character I have played on stage.

We've got people, our friends and neighbors, who are losing their jobs, factories being closed. We have to get America moving again.

The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.

The producer, in effect, has to work as a translator. You form a very tight relationship with the director and writer from the beginning, and then you are constantly communicating to the various people that begin to come into the process, as you are trying to manage to hold on to a vision that needs to be communicated over a long period of time.

I'm very excited to see where the characters and their relationships go. But in the end, it really boils down to the people who have more power than me, who control the money.