I'm very nervous when I work in a film and very relaxed before a live audience. I like theater because it's more of an actor's medium. You can control your performance. In film you depend on the director to watch out for your ass, but in the theater you can take care of yourself.

Theatre is like broad brush painting, where you can go anywhere with your brush. But film is like painting with one of those little, pointy brushes, a stroke here and a stroke there. I love that as well. You have to internalise everything and get it right deep inside. And when you feel you get it right, it’s almost orgasmic! It’s a lovely experience.

To me, where theater has it all over film is that it’s in the moment, it’s tactile, you feel it …You’re completely immersed in it — right here and right now.

Stage acting is where the beauty of being an actor lies, while movies more or less follow trends. The quality of an actor is revealed on the stage.

Film and television essentially feel the same when you’re doing it, because it’s the same technical approach. All the homework is the same. The homework for each medium is all similar, but the gratification in a live theater context is much higher, because it’s immediate. It’s far more dangerous, because there are no retakes. It’s electric, it’s an actual chemical transaction that occurs between you and the audience. Whatever energy you’re throwing out to them they throw it right back to you, and it kind of feeds on itself in this vacuum…

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry. … A lot of what I do in theater is cinematic, and a lot of what I do in film is theatrical, but there are different rules to it. … each art form makes me more interested in the other art form because I try and bring in those techniques and those ideas and put them into a different way of using them.

The only thing that it has helped with when I do acting is that dance brings about a discipline. But the skills are totally different. You use your body to express to convey what you would like to communicate. Acting it is conveying a story through dialogue, the emotions are what is needed to come through.

I always find making the initial transition from film back to theatre slightly overwhelming because of the physical freedom being on a stage allows after having been confined to the edges of a lens for a period of time. But you learn to embrace and to own the space pretty quickly once rehearsals are underway.

I love the reach of TV as during a serial you reside in so many people's hearts and all the same time. But, in films and theatre your character has a definite graph and it is defined very well. When you choose to do a film or enact a play, from beginning to end you know your part. And as an actor it gives me comfort to know this graph. In television and particularly in some of the serials often this is not defined. Your role can change, which is very unsettling for me. It's one major reason why I am comfy doing theatre and films.

I think I automatically pick things up…I feel like I’m able to use my body and pick up the choreography in order to use it to move the story and character forward. That was something I was used to doing in ballet — and performing in pieces where I’d be creating a character with my body and expressing it that way. So that’s something that I still really love to do, and I think that’s partly why action is something that I’ve really taken to.

I like the aliveness of it [theater] – that awful feeling of being on the spot. I must assume the responsibility for that moment, for those actions that happen at that particular time. I don't find theater that different from painting, and it's not that I think of painting as theater or vice versa. I tend to think of working as a kind of involvement with materials, as well as rather focused interest which changes.

Television has lapped theater in a lot of storytelling techniques — realism, depth of character, complicated storytelling…What we have that’s different in the theater is the audience in the space with us. And I’m not interested in ignoring the space between us.

It’s so immediate. It’s very exciting. The audience is there so there’s no retake. There’s no stopping and no chance to redo. You feel the audience and their response to what you’re doing. You get the energy from the audience that you don’t get in a film. Live theater is fluid. You start at the top and go all the way through. You have a seamless feeling and it’s different each night, whether it’s a long or short run. Different things happen each night. There’s a different nuance with the people you act with in each performance. It may be very subtle and very slight and the audience may not catch it, but you do.

I was fortunate enough to be trained in the theater. Coming from the theater background, you’re schooled to play diverse roles in preparation for the repertory environment, or the repertory type of lifestyle. So, to me, going back and forth from genre to genre is only keeping true to the way I was trained in the theater. And I’m really an action fan. I’m a movie fan in general, but I’m definitely an action fan, as well.