Has she changed him? “People who know him say I have, and I feel really flattered. Made him talk more. He didn’t really talk before. He’s much shyer than me. Every sentence was unfinished. I used to say he was a home for abandoned sentences. Now he actually finishes them.” She sounds so chuffed, as if the thought has struck her for the first time. She is often described as Burton’s muse, but that makes her uneasy. She says she would not be upset if in future he didn’t cast her; there’s always going to be a film for which she isn’t right. “You can’t take it personally.” But what if he decided he no longer wanted her in any of his films? “Well, if it’s obvious that I’m right for it, I probably will take it personally. I’ll let you know when it happens.” Could their relationship survive that? “It will be interesting. It’s not without its pressures, working with Tim. It worked on Alice. Sweeney was very stressful, very hard on our relationship.” Is he a boss or partner on set? “No, he’s a partner in our private life, but when he’s directing, he’s the boss. And maybe I confuse that.”
The producer of Alice, Richard D. Zanuck, said the film was “for little people and people who read it when they were little 50 years ago.” This holds true for much of the work Burton and Bonham Carter have done together. And yet, she says, at 43 she feels adult for the first time in her life, and capable of playing almost any role. She’s ready for the mothers and the grannies, but that’s not all. “I feel more sexy than ever, not because I’m sexually attractive, I just feel I’ve grown into my body.” Did she feel sexy when she was a beautiful young thing? “No, absolutely not. Totally uncomfortable. It took me ages to grow into being a woman, into being happy with it. When I was young, I believed in being androgynous, you can’t flaunt it, you can’t use it. The whole thing was just something yuck, to be embarrassed about. And now it’s just like, ‘Hey, enjoy it!’ Now I feel fine about shapes and things. It’s nice to have curves. To be a woman.”
She polishes off the last of her double espresso. “I suppose I’m just a late developer.”
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