When you got an Oscar nomination for your first film, did you find it a lot to take in? I was very, very green and I was just going where I was told. I don't think I ever had an instinct for it; you either have or you haven't. I think I'm good at what I do because I'm an idiot. You have to be a bit of an idiot to be an actor. In what way? Well, at some level, it's like being a small kid when you believe in Santa. Somewhere inside you or this is how I do it anyway I really believe it. Obviously, not all of me thinks that, because I know that, you know, my son needs some school shoes or whatever. But that allows you to abandon yourself to something in a way that is really quite stupid. In a good way, I think.
In your new film, Small Things Like These (an adaptation of Claire Keegan's novella), you have an intense scene with Cillian Murphy. He plays a coal merchant in a small Irish town in the 1980s; you are the sinister Sister Mary, head of a Magdalene workhouse. It's a small but pivotal role why did you want to take it? Well, my agent sent me a script and said: Cillian Murphy's doing it. And when you hear the words Cillian and Murphy in the same sentence, you go: OK, I'm interested. But then I read it and I went, Hang on a minute The scene that we have oh, my God I went, I really want to have a crack at that. That is a juicy slice of pie! That is a real fucking cracker, that scene.
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