I am half Scottish. My father is an expat from Glasgow, and on my mother's side there's a bit of French, a bit of Scottish, a bit of Irish.

'You're Ugly Too' isn't a comedy, but it has a lightness of touch with a hard edge. But it's essentially a warm story tinged with a bit of melancholy in the great Irish tradition. I'm very proud of that film.

In 'The Hobbit,' there were British, Irish, Australian and New Zealand actors, and Peter Jackson was adamant that we would all sound like we were from Britain somewhere.

I love oatmeal. To me, it's not boring. I agree that ordinary oatmeal is very boring, but not the steel-cut Irish kind - the kind that pops in your mouth when you bite into it in little glorious bursts like a sort of gummy champagne.

When Edna O'Brien's first novel, 'The Country Girls,' was published in 1960, her family and neighbors in the small Irish village where she was born tossed copies into a bonfire expressly set for that horrifying purpose.

Rain is also very difficult to film, particularly in Ireland because it's quite fine, so fine that the Irish don't even acknowledge that it exists.