''I think she's got an idea of what she wants to create in a family but she's chosen the wrong guy. I love that she's completely flawed, really. I think the audience will find her really frustrating.''

 

Collette loves to see her co-stars stretching as well. Steve Carell plays her boyfriend, Trent, ''a horrible, manipulative, mean person''. Despite her role as his victim, Collette sees it as ''a great thing'' for Carell to play a bastard. ''I think he was oscillating between loving it and finding it difficult,'' she says with delight, ''because he's a really nice guy.''

 

Toni Collette and Bill Hunter in 

Toni Collette and Bill Hunter in Muriel's Wedding.

For Collette, repetition is the only real character evil. And although she claims to ''find it hard to do things comparatively'', she is swift to articulate the difference between any two of her characters, such as the disparate mental illnesses she portrayed in Mental and United States of Tara. There is more besides the common thread and Collette will show you the weave to prove it.

 

Or so it would seem. If Muriel's Wedding launched Collette's career, it was her Oscar-nominated performance in The Sixth Sense that landed her on Hollywood's A-list, and it was also the first time she had played a mother in a big movie. Since then, many of her vastly discrepant roles - and arguably her most successful ones - have had one thing in common: they have all been mums.

 

Yet that isn't how we label her. No matter how many times Collette plays a mother onscreen, or off (she has a daughter, Sage, and a son, Arlo), Collette is not seen as a mother. As The Huffington Post said recently, she has ''made a name for herself portraying raw, awkward, complex female characters''.