I'd say music runs in my blood. My parents are exceptionally talented singers, so even before I was born, it was a known fact to them that I'd become a singer. Thanks to my genes, I started off at the age of three and since then, music has meant ever...
I started playing guitar when I was 12 and probably from that age knew that I wanted to make music and make my own music. Playing with other bands like the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens was more like an apprenticeship for me than anything.
Women right now kind of have this idea of success - putting your career first and then having kids. On one side, it's perfect and it's a great plan, but on the other side, they don't explain to you that after age 35, you start losing eggs.
The way I looked when I started modelling - I was a skinny schoolgirl, stuffing tissues into my little 32A bra. I wasn't trying to be that thin; I was perfectly healthy, but still - that look is a total impossibility for women over the age of 20. Fas...
It's necessary to start most work alone. But I'm tickled to death when I can pull somebody in or join someone, whether it's borrowing poetry or traveling with an associate.
I started to do a study on how not to do stand-up comedy. Yeah, it's lonely work. You die, you die alone. It's you, the light, and the audience. If you win, you win big. If you lose, you lose big time.
It's a good time for me, but it's only recently I've become comfortable in my job. At the start, it's hard having the nerve to call yourself an actor, let alone doing it. I gave myself two years after drama school, and if I didn't make it, then I'd g...
I'm tired of being around men all the time. I'm going to start a band called Skirt with three girls and I'll play the guitar and sing backing vocals in drag. I went window shopping when I was in New York, saw a lot of amazing dresses.
It's really sad looking at people like Lindsay Lohan. She's an amazing actress, but you see what happens when people know too much about your personal life. They start not being able to look at you the same way professionally. I don't want that to ha...
We start 'The Butler' in June and that's incredibly exciting for me because I get to work with the amazing Forest Whitaker again. It's a phenomenal script and a great, great role - I play his son. Oprah Winfrey is his wife and my mother. My character...
There's nothing like sitting in a completely quiet room, and then the strings start up. It's like when you go to the cinema - the first two or three minutes of any film are amazing. Because the screen is so big. The scale. Directors can pretty much d...
When I started on 'Big Bang,' I was the only girl; I felt like I had four brothers. Then Melissa Rauch and Mayim Bialik came on the show, and we got really close. Because of that, I'm not so quick to judge other women, and now I have all these amazin...
I found an agent midway through my year-long run at 'Grease' and just started to audition. I fortunately booked 'South Pacific' six months after 'Grease' was over, and I feel like that was a huge turning point in legitimizing myself in the Broadway c...
Filming in India was one big adventure. For 'The Cheetah Girls', we were in Mumbai for two weeks, then Rajasthan for six weeks. Every day after shooting, I would hop into a rickshaw and start exploring the city. I even learned a bit of Hindi. It's su...
If people tell you it's impossible, it's an even better reason to want to do it. People have a tendency to see the problem rather than the final result. If you treat the problems as possibilities, life will start to dance with you in the most amazing...
'Hell is for Children' is amazing to do every night and 'Promises in the Dark' and 'Love Is a Battlefied,' of course, but my absolute favorite would be 'Heartbreaker.' It's the one that started everything, so it has a very special place in my heart. ...
Mum was an amazing parent and my best pal. The tragedy of it, really, was that she died from breast cancer just as I was becoming a man, aged 17, and we were just starting to speak as adults. She was snatched away, and it felt cruel. She made me laug...
When counting on learning from innovation, there are great successes but also failures. The Wright Brothers invented the aircraft and started an amazing process of innovation, where we now have planes that carry 500 passengers. Along the way there we...
You've got to invest in the world, you've got to read, you've got to go to art galleries, you've got to find out the names of plants. You've got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We're amazing people.
My own approach has always been to push intense emotions down and attempt to deal with them later. When I was younger, I was terrified to express anger because it would often kick-start a horrible reaction in the men in my life.
To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about...
