My films don't give you an easy ride. I can see that. The sense I get is that people have quite a physical experience with them. They feel afterwards that they've really been through something.
That's an important lesson for me, to not qualify my experience against somebody else's. My experience is the experience that I wanted to have, and have created for myself, but it doesn't make me any more deserving than anybody else - or less.
The experience of having a child does crack you wide open. I felt like I suddenly had to rebuild the skin that I'd grown over the years before having a child. Perhaps that might be quite interesting in terms of acting.
The desire to play has always been in me. I remember my first experience at about four or five of really dying to sing and dying to play that came from no one telling me to do so.
I actually didn't really go to college. I enrolled and never showed up. Being on a college campus where we shot some of the scenes in 'The Goodwin Games'... it did make me wish that was an experience that I had.
I was told to have an ice bath once, which I did once, and it was the most horrific experience. In my head it sounded like a great idea, so I filled my bath with ice and water, and it was absolutely horrendous.
After each experience, you grow up, you get enriched with something, and you don't know how you're going to be in six months, you don't know what you're going to want, what you're going to need.
I pray every night, sometimes long prayers about a lot of things and a lot of people, but I don't talk about it or brag about it because that's between God and me, and I'm no better than anybody else in God's sight.
For a healthy society, those laws and conventions should always support marriage as an institution characterised by an openness to children and the responsibility of fathers and mothers remaining together to care for children born into their family.
No intelligent government can continue to ignore the urgent priority of giving support and practical encouragement to marriage and family stability as the first response to growing social needs.
I was always self-conscious about the fact that I didn't have as much comedy experience as other people at 'SNL,' and I kept thinking they were going to realize they'd made a mistake by hiring me.
When I moved to Seattle in fourth grade, I joined the Seattle Girls' Choir. It's a world-class choir, and we competed, toured Europe, and went and sang at the Vatican, so it was a really awesome experience to have that young.
The problem with movies is that you see from the first day - you're on a train, and if the movie is not going in the right direction you know it right away. Sometimes, you can't get off the train, and the whole experience is painful.
I think theatre is by far the most rewarding experience for an actor. You get 4 weeks to rehearse your character and then at 7:30 pm you start acting and nobody stops you, acting with your entire soul.
When you're directing, you see your ideas. You see them created right in front of you on the monitor and the sound stage. You get that experience all over again when you get into the editing room and you start playing with it.
I feel that between my experience and my mother's, breast cancer is a little bit like someone who lives next door. I know what that person looks like and what their daily habits are.
We could in fact transport a person, say a kid who didn't know what it was like to be in a civil rights march. We could actually take you into that experience, so that you could better appreciate what happened and why it happened.
I've had a fair amount of experience with snakes, and I find them to be pretty honest in terms of how you read their body language and emotions. They'll tell you when they're grumpy. They'll tell you when they're okay.
Every film teaches you something; every experience on every film set with every co-star teaches you something. You learn something new. I think the challenge is to keep working harder and doing better.
Working on 'Gossip Girl' was a fantastic experience. It was my first real gig and I'm thankful for it - I got to learn a lot. I'm glad I got to explore getting comfortable in my own shoes in the background on a show like 'Gossip Girl.'
I am of the international upper class, the Swedish petit bourgeoisie of Jewish extraction with poor language skills, a conveyor of a few expressions and faces, with some intonation that combines ancient human experience with timely coquetry.
