When you're shooting you go to references in your mind. You think about how you should stand in these particular clothes, or how you should move. You think about the different characters you're playing, really.
My character in 'Fresh Meat' is quite prim and tidy, and then I basically had no make-up for the whole shoot of 'Kidnap and Ransom' - apart from a bit of Vaseline to make me look even sweatier!
There are times when you do a play when you are living in the character over a two-and-a-half-hour period or longer, and you come to the end of the night, and you can feel like you were hit by a truck.
When you're a young actor you like to go for characters with a bit of flair, so in many films I ended up playing the weirdos. I can assure you I'm not a psycho or a criminal or a bully.
I think I can see more clearly now - about how the pattern of past experiences has shaped who I am and the characters I have played - and I'm grateful for that.
I would never make up a character who didn't exist or an event that didn't transpire. If you're a real writer, you have other tools in your toolbox to build drama.
I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.
And while I might not always agree with the viewpoint I have to portray, because I play a district attorney, as an actress I can always tell myself that my character is trying to take the moral high ground.
It's so much easier for me to get up and be someone else than expressing my own thoughts and feelings. There's definitely something about creating a cloak of a character that helped me deal with my shyness.
It was in a stonecutter's house where I went to have a headstone made for Raftery's grave that I found a manuscript book of his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters.
Harrison Ford comes on set, and he's very polite and says, 'Hello' to everyone. He cares about everything that's going on, on set. He cares about what's going on with your character and what's in the scene and what's on the desk.
The story line was done in a way that's organic and was doled out very slowly in little bites. We think that's authentic for this character, that her feelings are very deeply buried or she never felt them.
With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.
I don't know if I am cut out to playing a bad character or not - I really should give it a shot. I would like to play the voice of a baddie, but that's really just a cop-out!
For me, being able to be vulnerable is difficult, but it's just something that I feel comfortable doing. I need to fully understand why, the thought-process behind the character and I have to believe it. That comes from a lot of preparation.
I'm really just playing when I write. I feel like I'm a kid again. I want my characters to do and say things like when I played with dolls!
There seems to be more opportunities for old guys like me to do a little fighting and running because the lead characters also require a bit of depth and maturity and gravitas that one is likely to acquire doing drama all those years.
Well, I think I've made 44 films and only like four times I've played real characters I'm just drawn to people who have a pioneer spirit, this extraordinary energy and commitment to their cause.
As I got further into my career, as a character of color, if I was going to have the types of opportunities I felt I deserved, and continue to have them, I was going to have to start creating those opportunities for myself.
Fight scenes are very physical for me. Sometimes I require my own body to move through them before I can tell where a character's likely to feel it.
No matter how much I plan the overall arc of the character, you get there day one on the film and you shooting certain scenes first, and it goes completely different to anything you ever thought of, and then it's done.
