The Telegraph has published a nice interview with Toni Collette for the UK release of “A Long Way Down”. They also talk about her early career and the current filming of “Glassland”. Twenty years ago, when Toni Collette was 21 years old, she got on a plane to France to watch her new film, Muriel’s Wedding, for the first time. “I turned up at the Cannes Film Festival, which is madness itself,” she says, “and I sat there in an auditorium with a few thousand people, and it was the most intense response. I mean, very, very positive and very vocal and very focused on me.” She laughs. “They pulled us all up onto the stage afterwards, and I thought it would be maybe one minute, but we were standing there for… ever. It was like 15 minutes of people clapping and cheering and hooting.” How did she feel, I ask? “Uncomfortable!” she says. “I was elated but I was also very jet-lagged, and it was just surreal. It was strange… and wonderful.” The first time most of the world noticed Toni Collette she was playing Muriel Heslop, a gauche, Abba-loving ugly duckling desperate to escape the suburban hell of Porpoise Spit, Queensland. People still come up and talk to her about Muriel “all the time”, she says. “It’s been used in schools and therapy, because it’s got so many different elements you can tap into.” The complete interview can be read here.

A new interview with Toni Collette and Dylan McDermott has been published by Parade Magazine. n this “limited event” series of Hostages (it will air 15 episodes consecutively, no repeats), a surgeon (Toni Collette) slated to operate on the president is taken hostage along with her family and told to kill him during the procedure. The head bad guy? None other than an FBI agent played by Dylan McDermott. Hostages, which is one of Parade‘s picks for fall’s top 10 new shows), premieres on Sept. 23 on CBS.

Toni, will your character be revealed to be not as morally upstanding as she seems in the first episode?
Collette: Nobody is [what they seem], and that’s one of the things that drew me to this. All the characters are very real and complex. The intense amount of pressure that this family is put under is a very negative situation, obviously, but something very positive comes out of it for [my character].

The complete article can be read at Parade’s official website.

Article courtesy Metro News Canada: Toni Collette says she feels somewhat disheartened by the male-dominated world of filmmaking and is pleased about the group of women driving her new feature, “Lucky Them.” Screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, the movie – about a journalist trying to track down a former musician-boyfriend in order to pen an article on him – boasts a female screenwriter (Emily Wachtel), director (Megan Griffiths) and executive producer (Joanne Woodward). “I don’t want to be sexist commenting on it, but you know I have to say I’m getting to a point where I am frustrated by the male dominance in this industry, so (this team) was a good thing, and is a good thing and there should be more women doing it,” Collette said in an interview. “I think we’re all pretty proud to have worked on something so female-oriented – not that it’s just for women, this movie. … All the right people came together.” “Lucky Them” features Collette as troubled Seattle music critic Ellie Klug, who is under pressure from her boss (Oliver Platt) to land a big story. In her quest to find her former flame, she’s joined by Charlie, an eccentric aspiring documentary maker (played with aplomb by Thomas Haden Church). The complete article can be read here.

Toni is featured in the September issue of Australia’s InStyle magazine – photographed by David Gubert (who’s also responsible for the beautiful header image of this site). Preivew pictures have been added to the gallery. A behind-the-scenes video from the shoot can be seen over at the InStyle official website. The magazine is already on newsstands.

Real character: Toni Collette in Sydney recently. Photo: Marco Del Grande

For many in Australia, Toni Collette is, and always will be, Muriel Heslop. It’s a role that has stuck with the prominent Australian actor as much for its own durability as for her capacity to elude stereotyping since. Playing a ”terrible” girl from Porpoise Spit shot Collette to international acclaim, laying the foundations for the array of extraordinary characters she has delivered on screen and stage since. Collette is the first to admit the ”profoundly life-changing experience” of Muriel’s Wedding (1994) gave her an ”unexpected career”.

In short, Collette is an enigma. The same can be said of her onscreen persona. The greatest theme to her roles might well be their lack of a theme. ”I’ve never been boxed in,” she says. ”After Muriel’s Wedding, I first went to America and I was sent all these scripts about fat girls overcoming hurdles. Something in me knew not to go down that road, even if it was a good script. I just never want to repeat myself. I also don’t want to be bored in life. The great luxury of being an actor is you get to be different people, and I would hate to be repetitive.” Her latest film, The Way Way Back, is no exception. The coming-of-age film is about a boy, Duncan, with a crippling lack of self-confidence and a divorcee mother (Collette) in a bad relationship, and who finds solace in a job at Water Wizz water park. The complete interview can be read at the Syndey Morning Herald’s official website and in the magazines archive.

Here’s a great new interview with Toni Collette by Slant Magazine: Before she recounts what she’s been up to this past year, Toni Collette takes a breath. In the wake of 2011, which saw the actress say goodbye to one baby (her Showtime series The United States of Tara) and hello to another (her now 18-month-old son, Arlo), you might think Collette was lightening her schedule, with little more than a little-seen indie (Jesus Henry Christ) and a small part in Hitchcock. But the actress has a much different tale to tell, divulging tidbits about at least six projects, all of which left her little time for rest in 2012. “This year has been bonkers,” Collette says. “It’s been right up there with the mid 2000s. I’ve been home about six weeks in total. But it’s been great – a very full, satisfying year of my family being a bit of a traveling circus.” One story Collette is eager to tell involves the common experiences of making Hitchcock and The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan’s Hitchcockian phenomenon that landed the actress an Oscar nod. Though the latter film hit theaters more than a decade ago, Collette says she felt a similar vibe on the Hitchcock set (particularly in terms of likely audience embrace), and that she also encountered private, eerily familiar spook moments.

“When we were making The Sixth Sense, I had a couple of weird things happening,” she says. “In the hotel room I was staying at in Philadelphia, I started meditating a lot, and then I would wake up at night, roll over, and look at the clock, and it was always a repeated number—1:11, 3:33, 4:44. That started to really spook me. And it did start happening again during Hitchcock.”

Anecdote notwithstanding, Collette doesn’t register as someone especially woo-woo or superstitious. She comes off as a woman with no shortage of secrets and side projects, like her focus on animal rights (she’s fought against unethical sheep farming in her home country of Australia) and her musical ambitions, which, in 2006, led to the debut album of the band Toni Collette & the Finish. The complete interview can be read here.