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You both started acting at an early age. Do you remember when you first started to consciously bring craft to your work as actors and finding your way?

JT: I remember being given a piece of advice when I was doing Atonement by Joe Wright. There was a scene where I had to weep. Hysterically weep. And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t cry. Couldn’t cry. And then I sat in the corner and all of a sudden my 16-year-old, dark teenage self found everything inside of her to get catatonically upset about and I wept and wept and couldn’t stop. After we cut, two and a half hours later, I was still weeping hysterically. Joe said to me, “You really need to learn to understand your character and get upset about what the character is upset about so you don’t have to draw from your own sadness so that you wreck your mind the rest of the day.” Definitely, those things should be present, but that was something I really learned and enjoy now… getting in the character’s head and not needing to force cry. It becomes much more fluid and that’s a craft thing.

DR: I think it was very gradual for me through different stages and it is still going on.

JT: It’s always going on.

DR: It’s constant learning. I think 14 was the age when I thought, “I really want to have a go at this and I really want to do this for the rest of my life.”

JT: Me too.

DR: I think you’re old enough to know that by then. I don’t think I got any solid, technical grounding until I was preparing for Kill Your Darlings, when I was taught how to breakdown a script and very basic stuff like, “What does your character want out of the scene? What is your character trying to do to the other characters when you say that line?” It’s all very basic, but I never learned it before, so I found that stuff really helpful going forward over the last few years.

JT: But it is a constant learning process. That’s the joy of what we do. You’ll never be the best that you can be. You’ll never get an A. You can always keep learning and being open and the best research that you can do is listen and learn. It’s like being a sponge for life, because you never know when you’re going to use it.

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