The Guardian has posted a new interview with Helena Bonham Carter, who played Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter films. She doesn’t discuss Potter in the interview, but Helena is attending this week’s media preview, which we are at. Of acting, she said:

“I always wanted to be a character actor, even when I was stuck inside a corset playing innocent girls,” she explains. “I always thought that they were so passive, which I now see as unfair. They weren’t passive, they were these amazing, dynamic women from the [EM Forster] novels. But I’m afraid that’s how I saw it.”

“It’s hard to be high profile and young,” she shrugs. “I wasn’t very confident; I was cripplingly shy. And, at the age of 19, you are all too aware of how people are perceiving you. I remember reading the first profile of me that was printed in a magazine and thinking: ‘Oh good, now I’m going to find out what I’m really like.'” She cackles at her naivety: “But no. That’s not the best way of judging yourself.”