Cate, the scenes with Andrew Simpson (who plays school boy, Steven), were they tough to deal with?
CB: I’m not interested in playing characters who see the world through my prism, I think the journey of understanding any character is to see how they tick boxes and how they differ from you. Probably the hardest thing was to liberate her from my own morality. I think the casting process was really interesting – maybe this is my morality coming in again – but it was important to me that the actor was above the age of consent. Although really, what’s the difference between 15 and 16? It’s the law, yeah, but he’s very mature. It wasn’t really until the end of shooting that I sort of gasped; he wrote me this handwritten letter that made me want to weep, about what the film had meant to him. It was then that I thought he was so young, you just tend to treat all the actors like normal actors once they’re there. LF: Cate, you and Judi have a rather aggressive fight scene in the film, were you nervous about taking on the great Dame Dench? CB: She had this strange Ninja Turtle back pad on that
