So what drew you to this role?

It was just the most emotional role I think I've ever read, and I was feeling very emotional and felt like I should do it. She was such a complicated character and did so many contradictory things, and was really challenged by it.

Do you think that part of the drama seemed to come out of the very inner silences and that kind of very restrained era. Do you think that's true?

Certainly the social malaise was that everyone was held back. It gives a different type of tension. The stakes are different than they would be today, you would have to alter that utterly.

How similar was it to what you were expecting?

It was really very close to how I dreamed it would be. It's hard because you are watching yourself and you are trying to get out of your excruciating auto-criticisms and be able to watch your own film and I find it takes probably more than one viewing to see things objectively. I'm watching the "Labour of Love" and feeling so many things from it, and Jim's work is so beautiful, and the fact that Ishmail accomplished this with the budget that he did is literally cinema magic, just to do that by itself. Jeremy Northam’s work was so fantastic and Kate Beckinsale and James Fox and Angelica Houston and I was transfixed watching them all. And I couldn't move the whole time.

You've said already Charlotte is complex, do you like her as a character?

I do like her, because for all her faults she is essentially ruled by her heart and she suffers a slightly immoral streak but it's such an American point of view to really judge her for that in the first place. It is all the more interesting because she is an American woman and yet, raised in Europe without parents and no money she's very liberated in an almost crazy way. In her setting she is kind of nuts and she walks this incredibly thin line between being extremely self-possessed to the point of ridiculously self-possessed and totally emotionally out of control and unstoppable at the same time.