"When I was three and living in South Shields, my Auntie Shirley was having a party and borrowed some seven-inches from my mum. As they were going through the records playing them, this song came on, and it’s got an incredible opening refrain. It’s so dramatic. Even humming it to myself now years later, I get this exhilarating sensation remembering what it was like hearing it for the first time."

"They’re a 1970’s California band with great haircuts. My mother used to play me this song when we drove to school every day. It’s the only CD we had in the car, so I heard it every morning for two or three years on repeat. It reminds me of my childhood. The melodies in this song are so incredible, and I feel like they subconsciously inspired me a lot."

"Clint Eastwood is an inspiration to me as an actor. He, Robert Redford, and Michael Landon, might be three of my biggest influences as an actor. In each of those cases, it’s the fact that they play everything with a “less is more” style. There’s just something about that style that I try to tap into every now and then; it’s definitely my approach to a lot of things."

"A work I believe Bergman made for television, so it is perhaps not so well known. It goes very far into the riddle of marriage, the breakdown, pain, and passion. I’ve seen it three times already, and I want to watch it again with friends (most of us with one divorce under our belts!). The performances are stunning and the story surprises, touches, and absorbs me each time I see it."

"I have three of her poetry books, and will often pick one of them up to dip back into her work. I find it very calming, and each time I read one of her poems it has some relation to something that I am doing or feeling at the time. It’s the way I feel about Joni Mitchell’s lyrics. They seem to correspond to whatever is going on in my life."

"Kiarostami’s world-beating mystery is less about method and meta than the filmmaker usually prefers, but the immediacy of its peril and intimacy of its reality are pure soul glue. Such is the film’s veracity that I didn’t see the three-part schematic construction of it until I’d seen it four times, by which point it ceased to make a difference. The ending, for simply being itself without apologies, is peerless."

"I read this when my first boyfriend broke up with me and wept across three continents—weeping seems to be a theme today. The protagonist is one of those assholes who thinks he’s going to ‘save’ a sex worker (the politics are rough), but the obsession and abandonment shit is on point. Then I bragged to my college English teacher and he was like ‘oh, that’s a lesser British novel.’ Whoops!"