When you have a lot of opportunities, which I am blessed to have had in terms of my work, you get into the habit of not paying attention to certain specifics. And as we get busy, anything we do is the same thing.
My advice to new actors is: Don't be lazy. Go after what you desire. Don't heed the commonplace advice that is meant to discourage you. If you want it, go and get it. Be willing to work hard, and be patient. Be kind to yourself.
I have 800 books of just Samuel Beckett's work, tons of his correspondence, personal letters that he wrote. I have copies of plays he used when he directed, so all of his handwritten notes are in the corners of the page.
To me, celebrity doesn't mean a whole lot unless you're willing to use it. So I wanted to use it in a different way, with my AIDS work, the human rights stuff for the gay and lesbian community and the speaking I do.
Personally as an actress, when I work on something, that's it and then I move onto the next thing. I'm not someone who sits and watches my stuff. I like to go onto the next thing that I'm working on, and the thing that's been completed is completed.
Everybody is just at the start of this huge process of trying to unravel what's going on with the 4,400, where they've been and why they're back and what they're trying to do with us in the present. And we're trying to work out what messages they're ...
But what I will do is I'll acknowledge it and if it can be of any help the fact that I do acknowledge it then maybe other people will benefit from it because I do have somewhat of a public forum being in the line of work I am.
People get up, they go to work, they have their lives, but you'll never see the headlines say, 'Six billion people got along rather well today.' You'll have the headline about the 30 people who shot each other.
All of a sudden, those few pages of script that he had shown me with the weird images I could visualize all of that in my brain, and I knew that there was this mad little genius at work here and I really wanted to do the film.
I've been very lucky to work on a wide variety of projects, including two long-run and top-10 dramatic television shows. That is why it is so important to offer a helping hand to the next generation of young Latinos coming up behind me.
I think that all actors find they go down and then they come back up if you work on your craft. They come back up to the top and then they go back down and they come back up and they go back down.
No one asks the cow or the chicken where it gets its protein. I eat about 4,000 or 5,000 calories a day, and I cook for myself. I also have a line of cooks that work with me - some raw, some vegan.
There's shorthand that happens when you work with someone you know where you can almost finish each other's sentences. There's just a certain back and forth that becomes much easier with someone you've worked with for so long.
A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.
Some people say to be an actor you've got to die to do it. I think it's healthy if you think, 'I'll do it if it works, and if I don't, I can do something else.' That way seems to work for me.
I was never an ingenue. I've always just been a character actor. When I was younger, it was a real problem, because I was never pretty enough. It was hard, not just for the lack of work, but because you have to face up to how people are looking at yo...
The roles I was lucky enough to get were real stretches for me: usually a character who was older, or a little weird, or whatever. And it was hard, not just for the lack of work but because you have to face up to how people are looking at you.
You think when you start getting jobs that it'll get easier, but that's the biggest lie ever. It gets harder. You have to put in more work. I wish it were the casting couch days because it'd be a lot easier!
If you stick with a vision, it might not all work, but some of it will be absolute genius. To me, 15 minutes worth of absolute genius in a film is so much better than two hours of mediocrity. I would rather pay to see something different like that.
Fifteen years ago, I suffered a stroke, which caused me to lose my speech. Now, what does an actor who can't talk do? Wait for silent pictures to come back? I work with a speech therapist twice a week.
People always tell me, 'Don't work so much', but I can't help it. I feel like all the things I've done are important to get to this adult stage and now I'm getting all these adult offers, so it's working.
