Here’s a first promotional interview for “Hitchcock” by Cinema Blend: Though it’s now considered one of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterworks, Psycho was initially deemed a risky prospect by everyone in Hollywood, even Hitch’s most ardent supporters like his wife Alma Reville and his devoted assistant Peggy Robertson. The struggle to get Psycho made is the focus of the new film Hitchcock, but at its throbbing heart are the two women who helped this genius filmmaker make the best out of Hitch’s films and his iconic image. Toni Collette tackled the role of Peggy Robertson, who served as Hitchcock’s personal assistant through four decades and scores of films and television productions. While she is known to have been Hitch’s right hand woman and dedicated defender, little else is certain about her or her role in the makings of his films. This offered a unique challenge to Collette, who had much fewer historical resources on which to base her character than the rest of the cast. But by focusing on what kind of person Peggy must have been to be able to handle 40 years of Hitchcock’s reputed bad behavior and wicked humor, Collette created a portrait of Robertson that shows her to be sharp, collected, and ready for anything. The complete interview can be read here.

A winner in the 2009 Women of Style Awards, actress Toni Collette talks to Jessica Rowe about babies, the big screen and being a homebody. Toni Collette is one of our biggest stars—though you’d never know it. The 39-year-old likes nothing more than hanging out in her trackie-dacks, on the couch, with her family of four—husband and musician Dave Galafassi, daughter Sage, four, and son Arlo, 18 months. But there’s no denying acting is in the DNA of Collette, who these days finds herself drawn to playing mother figures, women who are flawed, raw and honest. In her latest performance, she becomes the gutsy and ballsy Shaz; the film, Mental, is a “dramedy”, written and directed by PJ Hogan, who brought Collette to the world’s attention with his 1994 film, Muriel’s Wedding. And just as with those beloved Heslops of Porpoise Spit, the family dynamic in Mental is a little, well, twisted. The complete interview with Toni Collette can be read over at InStyle’s website.

Here’s a new in-depth article on Toni and the upcoming Australian release of “Mental” by The Age Life & Style. From working-class Sydney to Sunset Boulevard is quite a journey, but Toni Collette has made it look easy. Amanda Hooton meets the instinctive actor and hands-on mother who has taken the “t” out of can’t. You can tell Toni Collette is a celebrity because of her hair. It’s blonde (art, not nature) and thick, and it has an excellent kink in it, swinging over her forehead and brushing her cheekbone. Even when celebrities shave their heads – as Collette has done on more than one occasion – you just know the great hair is there, waiting to spring forth again upon an astonished world. Apart from the hair, Toni Collette has turquoise eyes with thick, dark lashes, long teeth, a great figure (including quite a big bottom), and is far friendlier than I expected. Back in the ’90s, she seemed anxious and uncertain, often arriving late to interviews and sounding spiky and defensive. These days, however, she’s famous enough to do hardly any publicity, and perhaps this makes it easier for her to be calm with the journalists she does meet. And given that I manage to fling iced water all over the hotel lounge the moment we meet, and then burp loudly while she’s trying to answer a question a few minutes later, she’s actually under no obligation to be calm at all. But she is. “Burp it up,” she says cheerfully, pointing one long finger, with a short, purple-painted nail, towards my enormous stomach (I blame pregnancy for both aberrations). “Kids are the greatest, greatest thing,” she says. “You love them so much, you just want to …” She mimes a great big bite, as if eating a hamburger. Collette has two children – daughter Sage, 4, and son Arlo, 1 – and she arrived on the set of her latest film, Mental, last June, when Arlo was only nine weeks old. The complete article can be read here.

On showtime’s United States of Tara, Toni Collette, 38, plays a peculiar suburban mom who inhabits seven other identities, including a gun-toting guy. We checked in with the eighth version of Collette, the Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning actress herself, pregnant (at press time) with her second child and due in late April, from her home in Sydney.

By “standing behind large objects. So I’m stirring lots of large pots and carrying lots of plants and books.”

Collette and her husband, musician Dave Galafassi, who have recorded an album together, “share everything. My husband is supportive, handsome, a useful human being. He’s a miraculous man. They do exist.”

“We live in the outback with kangaroos and don’t have cosmopolitan cities and lives.”

Promotion for the third season of “United States of Tara”, which premieres tonight on Showtime, has been quiet – probably due to Toni Collette’s pregnancy. However, USA Today has put together a nice piece on the show including an interview with Toni: It’s one thing to nail an American accent as an Australian. It’s another to master seven of them. And it’s yet something else to do so from more than 7,000 miles away, as Sydney native Toni Collette has done in her role as Tara Gregson, the Kansas housewife and mother with dissociative identity disorder at the heart of Showtime’s United States of Tara. The series returns for a third season Monday night (10:30 ET/PT). No matter that Collette lives Down Under. On Tara, she talks as though she lives down South (as beer-swilling, motorcycle-cruising, Y-chromosome-owning Buck), downtown (as Noo Yawk feminist therapist Shoshana Schoenbaum) and down in some Midwestern basement (as gum-snapping, ponytailed, teenage T). And those are only three of Tara’s alter egos. Collette, 38, has never worked with a dialect coach on the show. She credits her uncanny — and Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning — ability to inhabit thoroughly Yankee characters so convincingly to “a misspent youth watching too much American television.” But her talent for drawling twangs and nasally honks aside, “I’m attracted to roles that have a sense of truth to them and a sense of universality to the story,” regardless of geography and demography, Collette says.

The Australian has recently interviewed Toni Collette in their 10 questions section.

Many scenes from your films are indelible. Your character Lynn in The Sixth Sense bursting into tears in the car as her son (Haley Joel Osment) says he has spoken to her dead mother. Muriel’s Wedding, in which you joyously stride down the aisle with that fantastic Cheshire cat grin on your face. That powerful scene in The Hours, in which Kitty’s bubbly façade momentarily drops away and she falls into the arms of Laura (Julianne Moore). Are scenes like this all about instinct – or burn-the-midnight oil rehearsal? I prefer less rehearsal and more thought before a scene. I’m open to rehearsing if my collaborators are that way inclined. But most people waste the time playing stupid and fruitless games. Literally. I have only worked with a couple of directors who really use the rehearsal period in a beneficial way. Generally, if I am truly meant to play a character I have an instant alignment with the scene and the way it’s to be played as soon as I read it. I can see and feel it as I read it for the first time. It gets me all stirred up and excited. So rehearsing can feel like it gets in the way of an honest moment one might want to save for the camera.

The Academy Awards are on this weekend. Do you enjoy the big award shows like the Oscars and the Emmys? Yes, from home. I always have. But most are too long, wouldn’t you say? They’re also fun in reality but too nerve-wracking to be entirely enjoyable.