I think a lot of playwrights have a script in their bottom drawer that hopefully no one will ever see about a bunch of young people sharing a flat and getting up to crazy stuff.
I just felt like reflecting on my junior year, when I didn't know what I was doing, I left a lot of stuff out there. Actually, I gained close to 700 yards more and I took myself out of a lot of games.
I think playing somebody who's schizophrenic is such a lesson as an actor. It gets you totally out of your comfort zone, because you can't rely on your technique, your external stuff. You've really gotta look inward, in a way.
With 'The Tudors,' I had a huge amount of material, I mean so many books and so much stuff about what they really said. So, in a way it was kind of trying to strip it out and find the stories inside all this material.
I've always felt a bit of an outsider. It used to worry me that, in terms of TV, I did not look like 'the girlfriend' or 'the daughter'. That pushed me to write my own stuff, as I thought no one else was going to write me a lead in the sitcom.
As a child I read all kinds of stuff, whether it was 'Asterix and Obelix' and 'Tin Tin' comic books, or 'Lord of the Rings,' or Frank Herbert's sci-fi. Or 'The Wind in the Willows.' Or 'Charlotte's Web.'
We aren't handicapped in any way except by what other people think. Focus on people's abilities. I can't be on 'American Idol,' but there's all kinds of stuff I can do.
It's a confidence booster for me to be known as a female who can take on any action, which is nice, to have that reputation, because then people know that when they hire me, I can actually do the physical stuff.
If you want to know how far gossip travels, do this - take a feather pillow up on a roof, slice it open, and let the feathers fly away on the wind. Then go and find every single feather and re-stuff the pillow.
When I was in college, my parents' house burned down, and took a lot of the possessions I'd grown up with. That's probably one thing that made me realize material stuff is not really that important.
I mean, we've had all these awful pictures from the prison in Iraq and these sort of memos floating around about justifying torture, all this kind of stuff. And it makes you want to take a shower, you know?
I've done that kind of stuff in records, where you start going back and you want to just redo everything, destroy everything, because you think it all sucks and you can do it better.
I used to do stop motion in my own garage and Claymation and all that stuff. That led to doing backgrounds and matte paintings. I started doing matte paintings professionally back before the computer, sort of painting on glass.
Young adults in their late 20s are confronted by so many choices - there are so many different paths to choose. Sometimes I think we just fill our lives with stuff so we don't really make any choice at all, which is certainly incredibly luxurious.
I don't know about an awful lot of stuff. I'm not educated. I left school when I was 16, with no qualifications. The thing that I do know about is my feelings and what I think of the world and what I think of me.
The most clear way to decide the actor is to watch them doing stuff during their downtime. When they do something that's making both of you laugh, you see if there's a character or situation that could be written into.
As people of color, it took a whole generation in many ways to get us out of the kitchen, and it's gonna take us the same whole generation to get us back into the kitchen and have ownership of restaurants, hotels and stuff like that.
I was listening to a lot of math rock-y type bands do lots of complex stuff and I couldn't figure out how they were doing it. Then I realized that sometimes they were finger tapping, so I started messing around doing it.
I worked with AXE Hair to do a promo shoot for the ESPYs and ESPN - it's all about having girl-approved hair. They have a newer product out there with the hair stuff - shampoo, conditioner and all the styling products that they have.
The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis - and, of course, in capitalism we're not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let's mention it anyway - shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computeriz...
I can remember the night I became a Christian. And man, this weight came off of me and all that kind of stuff. What I didn't realize was, that was just the beginning - of a huge journey.
