The Ghost Whisperer star talks dating, dieting and directing... As well as starring as ghost whisperer Melinda Gordon you also directed the first episode of the latest series. How was that? "I loved it! I was totally bitten by the directing bug. I am bossy by nature, so it was perfect." The first episode sees the action jump forward five years after Melinda has her baby. Why's that? "We felt we could tell more interesting stories with Melinda's child being five years old. It is hard carrying around a baby and, with the activeness of Melinda's life and the ghosts she deals with, doing that with a newborn all series was going to be tough." Does her son, Aiden, have her ghost-whispering gift? "The reason Melinda initially didn't want to have a child was because she was worried he or she would have the gift. It brought a lot of torture to her life as a child. But when everything happened last series with her husband dying, she wanted to have a part of him. Now she has to figure out if Aiden is special because he is hers or special in the ghost whisperer way." Why do you think the show is so popular? "Death is an uncomfortable subject. It's obviously not something that people want to have happen to them, but it's inevitable and I think the show makes it really interesting." Do you ever worry that the show will run out of ghosts? "I do worry sometimes that we are repeating ghosts, but the writers keep coming up with stories. This year we have a headless horseman." How do you cope with the pressure to stay thin in Hollywood? “The pressure is definitely there, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t. I will meet some people who are like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you have, the perfect body’. Then I'll meet somebody else that says, ‘So are you struggling?’ You really have to satisfy yourself and feel good about yourself.” You've written a book called The Day I Shot Cupid about dating. How much is it based on your own experiences? “I've been working on it for about four years and it's advice mixed with funny anecdotes from dating. It says no matter what your lifestyle is – whether you're an actress in Hollywood or whether you work at the dry cleaners in Omaha – the common thread is that men are completely confused by women and women are completely confused by men." So does it tell you how to find Mr Right? "It teaches you more about what to look out for. I feel women are at this point in the dating world where we sort of blame everything on men for not understanding us. I try to say in the book that maybe we need to better understand ourselves in order for them to better understand us." A new series of Ghost Whisperer starts on Living in July.
