I like challenging parts, something I haven't done yet, something that scares me. There's just a feeling I get when I read a script that I love, I feel an attachment to it, a yearning to play that character.
I'd say Rob Reiner's 'When Harry Met Sally' is my all-time favorite. It made me realize there's a way of telling a story where the audience is so in love with the characters that they forget you're even telling a story.
I've been in the studio experimenting on making a CD of my own. I'm trying out different producers, styles, sounds. With music, as opposed to acting, you are not playing a character. You are showing people who you are. I really want to have my spirit...
But I was always much more interested in reading fashion magazines than I was music magazines when I was a teenager. Just that sense of romanticism and escapism and the dream of it has always been quite alluring to me, as well as that sense of becomi...
I'm not a fan of anybody music who I feel like a sucka. I don't listen to you. They play you in the club, you can have the #1 jam, but if I know your character, how can I listen to your music?
I find that, maybe because I'm also a singer, I hear music in characters all the time, even if they don't sing. I hear what affects me in my heart.
With film, it's all about the actor being able to feel the things that the character's feeling. It must do some strange things to your mind. Music I find much easier because you're being honest about where you are as a person.
I'm very interested in writing an actual series, that doesn't have too much to do with my music - a world I create that has characters in it. I'm just trying to get there by doing things that I want to do.
To anybody who says to me, 'I'm in character,' I say, 'You should be in an asylum.' If you don't know that you're pretending, then you should really seek medical help. I don't have patience for that stuff.
I want readers turning pages until three o'clock in the morning. I want the themes of books to stick around for a reader. I'm always trying to find a way to balance characters and theme.
Matt Weiner is very perceptive; there's something about the rhythms and the way people speak that is very authentic to the actor. But there are qualities that are dissimilar. The characters on 'Mad Men' are struggling with pretty profound unhappiness...
I would say what Mad Men has taught me has been a super elevated evaluation of text in general, and understanding subtext, and understanding where a character comes from - what he means by this or by that.
I've never played a character where I've had so much fun on the physical end. I don't want to say I like it too much but it's fun having a gun on you and getting to manhandle men.
I don't judge people by their accent, or how they word things, or how grammatically correct their speech is. Some of the smartest men in the world couldn't spell. I judge a person by their character.
When I sit down to talk to men's magazines, there's a certain character that I play. She's not fully fleshed out - she doesn't have her own name - but she shows up to do men's-magazine interviews.
Sometimes I've been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.
Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.
Often, as a young actress, you find yourself being the only girl in a room full of men... and one of the reasons why I like 'Grey's Anatomy' is because they have such strong female characters and the women really drive this show.
Well, my mom is single and we've both been single at the same time over the last ten years, so I really related to the bond between my character and Diane's.
My characters always start well in movies. Almost every movie I've done starts with a happy marriage, it's all beautiful, wealthy, whatever... and then of course my husband leaves me, and everything falls apart.
At the beginning of 'The Hills,' I couldn't watch myself because I'm very critical and would pick myself to pieces. But with movies I feel like it's different because you're playing a character. So it's like watching yourself but not watching yoursel...
