This is a very different story to anything we’ve seen you in before. What drew you to it?

I was just fascinated by it. I’d never heard of Katherine Gun. And I remember a lot about the lead up to the 2003 war, but I was just kind of fascinated that I didn’t know this piece of the puzzle. And so I read it and just felt like it was kind of quite an important story to tell.

So what were you doing at the time?

In 2003 I was anti-war and I was on some of the anti-war marches, but not the biggest one because I was also filming Pirates of the Caribbean. During the biggest [march], I was actually in LA on the phone to friends of mine who were there, as I was dressed as a pirate. I’ve always been interested in the world around me. How can you not be? I think that’s all politics is, looking at the world around you.

It’s a very interesting time for this film to come out. Why is it that now was the time to tell this story?

I think all of a sudden people are more politically aware right now. I know that they’ve been trying to tell this story for a number of years and they couldn’t get financing for it or one way or another it didn’t come together. But right now there is a thirst for more of a political kind of conversation. I guess this very definitely falls into that category.

The film is about how Katherine Gun tries to stop the Iraq war, but she often talks about her mission as a failure. As someone who’s been engrossed in her story, do you see it as that?

It’s a heroic failure, but yeah, of course [it failed] because the Iraq war happened. What she was trying to do was stop a war. What she was trying to do was save lives. And she didn’t. But I think where she absolutely isn’t a failure is that very few of us stand up. We all like to talk a good talk, but very few people would put that into action. There are very few truth tellers because the consequences of that are so huge. We don’t live in a society that applauds truth tellers. And so I think she is utterly heroic in my opinion. I think what she did was extraordinary. But no, unfortunately [she failed]. I’m sure everybody wishes that you could go back and that the millions of people who died in that conflict hadn’t died, but we can’t.

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