When I look back on my career - if that's what it is - it looks a bit like a crazy quilt, and I think it's just really because, when one job has finished, I've never really been in a position where I had three or four options.
Allison Janney's character in 'The West Wing' was so rocking! I am a huge fan of Mary Louis Parker and her character in 'Weeds.' My manager says, 'you have to grow into yourself, Allison' because all the characters I want to play are, like, 39.
I just started writing for my own amusement and occasionally singing in little clubs around Los Angeles. Then I wrote 'The Rose,' and through a series of divine things that I had no control over and had no idea were going to happen, it got in the mov...
I am an advocate for going to the doctor and going every year. I make sure that part of the checkup is spent talking about my heart with my doctor, and getting my numbers checked, and discussing the results. And I make sure that I understand the answ...
The idea that we cause harm by doing what we perceive to be the right thing, that's another theme that interests me. Because most people don't intend to cause harm, they cause harm by doing the right thing - in their mind.
I was always a show girl. My parents were wonderful. There wasn't a lot going on where we lived, but they ferried me to classes and competitions all over the place. When I was 12, I came to London as a finalist in a singing competition and I was comp...
Naturally enough when I was a young dancer, I was terribly anxious to get ahead, and to get ahead quickly. I was impatient with all those older people who talked of the long grind to the top, who turned me down for jobs I knew I could do.
It is such a cut throat industry where you get knocked down so much and get rejected so much. If you do not back yourself up, no one else is going to so you really need to learn to get up, shake the sand off your chest and keep going.
My daughter's just going to be really hip! My goal is to be as eco-conscious as possible: There's so much out there for parents who want to do that. I plan to keep her eco-friendly as she gets older. I think we all sort of have to do it.
I take my dog, Fideo, out for a hike in Runyon Canyon three times a week. It's about 45 minutes round-trip with a variation of super steep hills and flat areas. He's always running ahead, which helps me push myself, especially up the hills.
Nothing surprises me on 'Happy Endings,' because the show - I think one of the awesome things about the show is that it's so open to doing anything. We could do a genre episode. We have the green light to do whatever we want. Mostly because no one's ...
The thing is when you play a character it's the persona you bring across from a book to film, or book to script to film. If I play Frank Sinatra, there's gonna be things I do in a movie that Frank might not have done, but it's the personality that co...
It surprised me, the feeling I got when I won the Oscar for 'Scent of a Woman.' It was a new feeling. I'd never felt it. I don't see my Oscar much now. But when I first got it, there was a feeling for weeks afterward that I guess is akin to winning a...
I think once I was in high school - I had boyfriends and stuff like that, but I think when I was younger, I went through a period where I looked like a boy, and people thought I was a boy.
I don't play roles everybody likes. I'd rather have a career I'm proud of. Like everyone else, I need to eat. But I'm a very unbusinesslike person, and I keep my price low. I'm not a mass product. I'm not everyone's cup of tea.
I lived in Chicago for a few years and got a sense of - kind of that broad-shouldered, windy, um, stern, Midwestern, warm-slash-passive aggressive, wonderful - every adjective I can think of, very cold.
Sometimes in my class I have people come in and do monologues inspired by people they know and I always find that to be useful to do specifics about somebody and then you're actually doing a character and not doing some random old lady or something.
Well, the years from 10 to 20, when your body, mind and everything is like changing every five minutes, can be pretty torturing. And most of the interesting characters, I think, are somewhat tortured or torturous. I'm 20 now, so I'm only just an adul...
When people send people on summer camps or bonding trips, they send them to do things like high rope climbing or extraordinary things. And when you do extraordinary things with people, like fighting battles or simulating huge wars, you do bond very q...
I went out for a film where they wanted seven brothers and one sister, so I was there for half a day while they were waiting for 'Archie' to read for a boy... I've had drivers come to pick me up in England looking for a blond, blue-eyed Scottish boy.
We kept our heads down and did our jobs. We controlled the only thing we could, which was the show. We did the thing. Because remember, the talking about the thing isn't the thing. The doing of the thing is the thing.
