Here’s a great new interview with Toni Collette by Slant Magazine: Before she recounts what she’s been up to this past year, Toni Collette takes a breath. In the wake of 2011, which saw the actress say goodbye to one baby (her Showtime series The United States of Tara) and hello to another (her now 18-month-old son, Arlo), you might think Collette was lightening her schedule, with little more than a little-seen indie (Jesus Henry Christ) and a small part in Hitchcock. But the actress has a much different tale to tell, divulging tidbits about at least six projects, all of which left her little time for rest in 2012. “This year has been bonkers,” Collette says. “It’s been right up there with the mid 2000s. I’ve been home about six weeks in total. But it’s been great – a very full, satisfying year of my family being a bit of a traveling circus.” One story Collette is eager to tell involves the common experiences of making Hitchcock and The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan’s Hitchcockian phenomenon that landed the actress an Oscar nod. Though the latter film hit theaters more than a decade ago, Collette says she felt a similar vibe on the Hitchcock set (particularly in terms of likely audience embrace), and that she also encountered private, eerily familiar spook moments.

“When we were making The Sixth Sense, I had a couple of weird things happening,” she says. “In the hotel room I was staying at in Philadelphia, I started meditating a lot, and then I would wake up at night, roll over, and look at the clock, and it was always a repeated number—1:11, 3:33, 4:44. That started to really spook me. And it did start happening again during Hitchcock.”

Anecdote notwithstanding, Collette doesn’t register as someone especially woo-woo or superstitious. She comes off as a woman with no shortage of secrets and side projects, like her focus on animal rights (she’s fought against unethical sheep farming in her home country of Australia) and her musical ambitions, which, in 2006, led to the debut album of the band Toni Collette & the Finish. The complete interview can be read here.

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