Whenever I go on the red carpet and I'm a bit nervous, I just say to myself the mantra, 'Come on Barbara, you gotta get those pictures posted on Instagram!' That's all I have in my mind, like, 'Look serious now, maybe give a little smile, but a cheeky one,' but in the end, it's never how it looks.

I'm more of the girl who's always in the friend zone, and I try to help if my other friend wants to get with someone. I can be a bit cheeky and say stuff that embarrasses my friends, but I'm normally the girl who guys like to be friends with, so I become friendly with the guy and then go, 'Oh, this is my other friend.'

I talked to friends who are actors and who do Shakespeare loads, and they all said 'learn it so that your family wants to clobber you, they're so bored.' You can never relax, that's the problem, because when you do, a bit of Shakespeare comes up to bite your cheeky behind. It just does, if you're not really focused on it.

I think there's a lot of, unfortunately, unfunny ventriloquists out there, so they've got a bad rap. It came after Edgar Bergen because everybody had a little cheeky boy dummy like Charlie McCarthy, and everybody decided to become a ventriloquist because Bergen had popularized it. He brought it back from the doldrums of vaudeville.

I was very aware of office politics because I was so baffled by them. So much so goes unsaid. No one says 'you're a cheeky so-and-so,' no one says 'you're so moody,' nobody ever confronts anyone else about anything. But I'm very crass, and I'm very confrontational, and I have a temper. I had to be hyper-vigilant in every office I worked in.

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