I recently chatted to Marisa Tomei at a mid-week press day for Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, and if there’s probably something to reports of her on-set friction with Mickey Rourke (answers regarding him ranged from coolly polite to awkwardly short and incomplete) it doesn’t dint my appreciation of her naturalistic charms, both physically and, every bit as striking, inwardly. Excerpts from the roundtable interview follow below:

On personal curiosity, and how she initially came to acting: “That is one of the great things about acting — learning about different people, different subcultures, even different skills. I mean, who thought pole-dancing was going to be on my resume? But I think that a lot of it was survival skill. I was a really shy kid, and it was [a question of], ‘How do you get to a place where you can let your emotions out really safely?'”

On My Cousin Vinny, and how Joe Pesci’s advice sometimes stinks: “It was the first time I was on location, and only the second movie I’d ever done. I was kind of overwhelmed on that level. I was a grown-up, but still kind of homesick. And Joe (Pesci) and I are still friends, he’s always looked after me. He’s always telling me when I suck and when I don’t. He told me I was an idiot for wanting to do this movie, and then he called me and said, ‘I guess you weren’t so stupid after all!’ But he’s always telling me the truth, and he’s such a good, good friend.”

On what she looks for in potential film roles: “I want to make movies with people who really, really care. And I think that I tend to respond more thematically than anything else. With this movie, it was really talking about changes of life, or facing getting older, or performers’ identity versus quote-unquote real people’s identity. I thought that those were interesting things to think about. In this case I could relate [to them more directly], yes, but it’s more is [a script] interesting, and what are the ideas about. I guess it’s all a matter of that [aforementioned] curiosity, really.”

On Darren Aronofsky: “He likes to talk, he likes to understand everything, and I appreciate that, and know where it’s coming from — it’s coming from really caring and wanting to support actors as much as he can. But sometimes I had to explain that it’s better for me not to articulate things, that it’s going to be detrimental to what he wants and what we all want, which is a natural feeling. But he’s right there, and tries to support you in every way he can, whether it’s bringing you little juices to make sure you don’t catch a cold and stay healthy to being available to talk about anything, if you want to. He totally notices everything — any little detail about your hair or your nail polish. I wonder what he’s like as a husband.”