Will you make it?

Yeah. Next summer. And it’s an incredible part for Michael. It’s this guy who wrote the tell-all book after Liberace died. He was with him for a long time. But he left him before Liberace got Aids.

So if the beginning of this decade was shaky, how do you feel now you’re on a huge roll?

Terrific. The roles just seem to get better and more interesting. It’s that very unfair thing about the movie business where, as a man, when you get to between 35 and 55, those are really the best roles.

Whereas, as a woman, those roles start evaporating. So for me it’s great. I’ve worked with all these directors and I want to start directing soon. And these terrific roles keep coming. And it’s with friends I’ve worked with before.

To be able to work with Steven five times… And six next summer. That’s all I could ask for. If I could just keep working, with the people I’ve worked with already, I’d be happy.

You put on a fair bit of weight for The Informant!. Was that on Steven’s instructions?

He never said put on this amount of weight. We’d been talking about the movie for seven years. I sent him a text about two months before we started. I said, “What do you want this guy to look like?”

And he wrote back, just saying, “Doughy!” And then I talked to him later when I got there and I put on the weight. I never weighed myself but I’m guessing it was 30lbs.

And I got there and he said, “I want to put a piece on the end of your nose. I just don’t want any hard edges. I want to look at you and not be able to define where you begin and end.”

And that’s a metaphor for the guy. Nobody can tell where he begins and ends and when he was telling the truth and when he wasn’t. Because the guy did look like that. He actually did.

And the wig that I wore – he did wear a hairpiece. The FBI took bets. They didn’t know whether or not he had a hairpiece. Half thought he did, half didn’t.

Scott even wrote in the screenplay, in the last scene, when he was bald, in the screen directions, “Even his hair was a lie!”

Next: Hair pieces, fake noses