I try too hard not to get things wrong.
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Question
What is the part of your job that people would be surprised is most of your job?
Craft & work
Question
What inspires you to learn?
Attention & the world
Question
Which writers or artists most influenced your work?
Taste & recommendation
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
What have you come to understand about what it means to be human?
Values & belief
Question
What are you unwilling to optimise?
Values & belief
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's The Q&A has retained this Proust-derived prompt from at least 2007 through 2026, and ABC independently put it to the Obamas in 2011.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Yielding to the wrong sort of melancholia.
Rosanna Greenstreet, The Q&A, The Guardian, 1 March 2014 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 252 →Speaking negatively to myself.
A willingness to go with my gut feeling, rather than wait a day and contemplate other options.
I cut people off a lot when I talk. It’s a terrible habit.
More from Geoffrey Rush
View profile →I am being careful not to clutter my life with career administration so I can keep the focus on the acting.
I still regularly read New Scientist to try to keep up with quantum theory and cosmological discoveries and so forth. And I read National Geographic—that’s not a plug.
The constant touchstone for me has been the Lecoq school and the mask work and clowning in Queensland
During my Queensland childhood, on the days when I avoided the chlorine-infused shower gauntlet and being corralled into the deep end of the school pool.
He was vulnerable to all the sorts of contradictions that every human can be subject to.
I tend to shape my life through aesthetic principles rather than economic ones – I’ve never been very good at maths.
More on identity & self
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Jack Whitehall, Romesh Ranganathan, Julie Andrews, Pauline McLynn, Alison Steadman, Frank Cottrell-Boyce
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