Thanks very much - great questions! It's been lovely. Farewell!

Actually, The Seagull is one of the things I've longed to do for a very long time. Going on stage is always a process that causes anxiety and nervousness. You don't know whether you'll end up with something you can wholeheartedly commit to for the length of time you've got to perform it. This has been one of those moments that is intensely pleasurable - the play, the role, the rehearsal process, the company of actors - it's all come together. I actively, even though I get anxious, look forward to doing it. That's a real privilege to have a job where you feel like that. And I'm really grateful for that.

Working with Mike Leigh is a process of distillation. You start with nothing, then with him you talk about a lot of people you've met who are in and around the same age group as you are, and somewhere Mike has an idea of the kind of person he's looking for. He guides you towards a few people and then inputs some ideas about what the person might be like. You come up with a notional character who then meets other notional characters he's been preparing with the other actors. Out of this cloud of ideas comes this landscape of characters who are walking, talking, bumping into each other and creating a story. Out of hours and hours and days and weeks of improvisation, Mike distils a script and once the shooting starts you turn up every day and shoot these fragments of the story, usually in order. But all you know about is your journey within that structure. You don't know what anyone else is doing. For example, when I was working with David Thewlis, I understood what we were doing together as characters but when I saw the film I was shocked to see how his character behaved with everyone else and what he'd been up to. I think all of Mike's actors must feel the same when they see their finished films because they have no idea what the other characters are doing.

I'm glad you enjoyed Afterlife. It was quite an unusual show for ITV and an attempt to investigate the nature of grief and death, how people cope with it, hide from it. So underneath a show that could be labelled a 'spook' show was an attempt to really examine some pretty big issues that everyone has. Andrew Lincoln is an amazing actor and turned into a great friend. I loved my character - she was such a crazy mess.

What was fantastic about Scott and Bailey was the opportunity to engage with female characters that were absolutely committed to their working life but also had to cope with all of the outside stress and pressure of their real lives. Sally Wainright's imperative was to show a police team working with great detail and reality on the cases that came in. She also wanted to show female comradeship. It was terrific that Suranne Jones and I played women of different generations who still had a complete friendship and comradeship in the workplace. Often on TV you see women in a workplace competing with each other - either sexually or within the hierarchy. I really liked playing a character who was unfussy, calm, competent, not complete in the way that she ran her family life, making mistakes with her children, trying to get things right with her husband. All these things that I see going on around the world with women - and, to my astonishment, not particularly well represented on TV. It was great to be part of a drama where the women' s stories and viewpoint are at the centre rather than being peripheral characters orbiting a male view of the world. More and more there is a clamour for stories that are depicted from a female point of view because TV and film and plays are seen by 50% of the population, which is women. They don't want to continually see stories through the eyes of a man. We have to start addressing that. It's difficult as an actor because actors can only deal with the scripts they're sent unless they start to originate scripts themselves. That's tricky because it takes a lot of time. I've started writing myself. I'm writing a novel at the moment. I'm thrilled about that. I'm 25,000 words in and counting.

Working on Three Girls, which was a drama depicting real events in Rochdale, required the utmost sensitivity and care because they're real people, who are still alive and able to see the work that we'd done, and able to comment on it. The work that was done on Three Girls before the actors even arrived took three years and was handled by the producer, director and writer with sensitivity. They had laid all that groundwork for us. I was fortunate enough to meet Margaret Oliver who I portrayed and she gave me an insight into her part of the story. The responsibility was to engage with the script, the way the story had been edited down into three hours, and be sensitive. Really, with every role that one takes on, there has to be some level where you understand that you are not that person, you are not in that situation, so you can have a perspective on what's going on. Otherwise, your own day-to-day life would be intolerable. It's been said that Three Girls was a piece of TV-making that harks back to a golden age of the BBC and I'd agree with that. It was a difficult show to get made but it seems that there is an appetite for this kind of programme-making. We should be thrilled and amazed that there are still TV companies in this country who would commission this work. It was very shocking when the news story itself broke and when the facts were laid bare in the show. I'm enormously proud to have been asked to be a part of it. This is one of the reasons I went to drama school.

Thanks for suggesting - I'd love to work with him ... again! I did Clocking Off, which he wrote in the early 00s. I was Trudy Graham, a loyal secretary who had a boob enhancement and was secretly in love with Phil Glenister who by the way I've just finished working with in Living the Dream on Sky1 on 2nd November. Paul Abbott is an amazing writer - I loved working on Clocking Off.

I'm so glad that you were validated. Everyone was so thrilled and surprised that The Full Monty was such a hit. It still lives on!

Acting Chekhov is like acting any other play. But Chekhov's plays are very specific in what they ask of actors - they really ask actors to delve into a deeper understanding of a character than appears to be present in the lines themselves. What you have in Chekhov is rich and detailed, and felt rather than spoken. Hopefully that's understood by the audience. That's why the four big Chekhov plays are still performed now. He plugged into the same thing that Jung and Freud brought to our attention later - the inner impulses that guide the behaviour of human beings. Chekhov was one of the first playwrights to be fascinated by that. Simon's translation of the adaptation is wonderful because it makes all of the dynamics between the characters incredibly clear and modern without making the play feel shunted from the world it was created in. In the play, you can sense there's a seismic shift in the world coming - all of the characters are fearful of something being taken from them, which arguably is the same case now. Simon has managed, very cleverly, to access that. As a writer, he has a similar ear and empathy for the human condition. That makes Simon a brilliant collaborator with Chekhov. Simon now has Three Sisters and Ivanov in his sights, having already done The Cherry Orchard too.

Hello there! It's very nice to be in the Guardian offices and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into these fantastic questions...