That’s quite all right. Someone should count up all the lies told in Closer—it’s a significant number. And your character, Alice, tells maybe the biggest one.
It’s an amazing part of Patrick’s structuring of the work, because you feel that Alice is the most honest one. I should say, I feel. That she’s the one who’s being emotionally honest all the time. Then you find out on the largest scale that she’s the biggest liar of everyone. But I think it’s important, because so much of this story is about authorship. The other characters are always saying they’re driven by love: Love makes them do things, they can’t help themselves. But she’s the one who takes authorship. That line where she says, “There’s a moment when you choose.” In the end, you realize she is truly the author of her life. Despite the whole muse thing—Dan [Law] steals her life for his book, and Anna [Roberts] steals her face for her photography show, and the whole concept of a muse denies that the muse invents herself, suggesting instead that it’s the author who creates this magical character—in fact this character created herself. She’s the driver, not the driven.

Yet you’ve been cast as a muse figure in a lot of films: Heat, Everyone Says I Love You, Beautiful Girls, Garden State.
I’ve played a lot of child roles, because I started at eleven, and children always end up being symbols in movies. They’re less real people, more idealizations of or nostalgia for what’s lost. Especially since I was never in kid movies, I was always in grown-up movies. In grown-up movies, the role of the child is to sort of be the prophet or something.

And now you’re reprising your role as a wise senator in Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, one of the biggest grown-up-kid franchises ever. What was new the third time around?
You learn after your first blue-screen movie, and more after your second, the extent to which you have to prepare. [In most films] everything outside of you is given to you—your set, props, costars. In this, most of the time there’s something you have to fill in. You’re often talking to a tape mark, an X, instead of a character, and you have to think what they might be thinking, what’s going on, how they’re treating you. You have to make up the other half of the conversation. And you have to sometimes—most of the time—imagine your entire world around you. What the scenery looks like, or the chair you’re sitting on or the animal you’re riding. Because literally everything is blue and you’re sitting on a box. We usually have pieces of stuff. I don’t want to diminish the set builders; there is a lot of construction and design. But ninety-nine percent of the shots have some blue screen in them. That’s a lot of external imagining; I probably worked harder at that this time.

Is that pleasant or unpleasant?
It’s challenging. It’s like a different skill. I enjoy it because it requires you to go back to something childlike. Where you can take the box that the TV came in and pretend it’s a city, you know? It’s a big challenge for the imagination, which I can’t complain about, but I can’t say it was easy, either. My character was pregnant most of the time, so that was always fun, to be in action costumes running around pregnant.