Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm really into sci-fi. I always have been. In addition to that, I've always had a tremendous fascination with the lure of the Apocalypse or Judgment Day or the Mayan calendar, etc., etc.
While 'The Help' is in so many ways a celebration of these women's friendships and what they overcome, it's also very truthful and very painful, and it was intense for my mom to read that.
'50/50' is a comedy. I shouldn't say it's a buddy comedy because it's not farcical, and it's based on a true story, but it's viewing that experience through a very truthful lens of humour.
I shouldn't have acted. I didn't exhibit any ability. I was one of the kids in the school play who was just mouthing words, and they weren't the actual words of the song. I was pretty lame!
You meet your soulmate, and you're like, 'Well, this is it. This is the feeling of falling in love, and it's the most intense it can ever be.' Then you have a child, and it's like - it's huge!
I think my favourite memory from filming 'Jurassic World' would just be a compilation of me running through the jungle in heels, and just how absurd that really was. That that actually happened.
My sister can walk down the street and just know what's going on with people. She'll say, 'Oh, they're going through a divorce' or, 'Their kid just went off to college' or, 'He just got a great job.'
Where I'm like,"no, I won't have that piece of bread, I'll have the veg." There's a different approach mentally that you have when you're in a safe space. Our body awareness in the West is ridiculous.
I did a play in New York at the public theater, a Shakespeare play, and M. Night Shyamalan, who is the writer/director of 'The Village,' came and saw me in the play and asked to go to lunch afterwards.
I saw an episode - the second episode [of Black Mirror], "Fifteen Million Merits" - and I completely flipped out: "This is what my nightmares are made of. This is the most terrifying thing I've ever seen."
For me personally, I don't go onto Twitter or Facebook, my hubby helps me out because sometimes I'm concerned that I'll see something that will upset me, and I don't have a way to work it out with that person.
Sometimes acting, particularly in film, can feel so contained. You need to be small and not overplay things, so it's such a relief to be able to go as far as you can go with an emotion or a feeling or a speech.
I want to be a good example for my son. That's the best way to parent - to be the example of what you want to see in them. That's definitely how my parents parented and how my grandparents parented. And it works.
I had watched an episode of Black Mirror almost exactly a year prior to when I started shooting my episode. I was by myself in New Zealand, and my husband was like, "You have to see this show. It's so incredible."
It's really about connecting to your own humanity and your own behaviors, and getting to a level of self-awareness so that you can have perspective and step outside of yourself and transform and become another person.
I feel like it's a subversive thing [a certain body type to admire] which keeps women preoccupied with something that doesn't matter, and takes up a lot of space, and prevents people from what they're meant to be doing.
For me, breastfeeding was even more painful than giving birth. And despite a lactation consultant, I felt incompetent. I forged on, barely sleeping, always either breastfeeding or pumping and never getting the hang of it.
I've always been a little bit cautious about what projects I step into. I don't mean to be dramatic, but I feel that every single thing you do in life, you give a piece of your soul, and I want to be responsible with that.
I have an association that director means total authority. Director means they will never let you down. Director means just trust them and fulfill their vision, and know that the story will be told in its best incarnation.
My parents taught me many of the things that people need in life to feel confident: practical things, such as managing finances, mucking out the goat barn, cleaning a house, doing repairs, mending a broken roof or a toilet.
I've always had the perspective that roles come into my life when I need them most and sort of teach me lessons. The same can be true of films, films are released into society to aid in a lesson, inspire people, comfort people.
I've learned to think in terms of having a long career. Actors can have very long careers that last until the day we die, but there will be moments when you'll feel like you're a failure or when you're disappointed in yourself.
When I was seven, I was allowed to be an extra in 'Parenthood,' which was amazing. But then I kind of got addicted to it, and my parents didn't want me to want to act. They felt that would be putting your kid in an adult world.
When I was coming of age, I remembered reading and studying the initial ideas within the feminist movement. There was this idea with my parents' generation that in order to find equality, a woman would need to behave like a man.
The greatest sci-fis, in my mind, are two things: They're what-ifs - what if this happened, and you get to see it - but they're also these philosophical cautionary tales. They deal with the underlying themes beneath the what-if.
If I was producing something, it wouldn't make sense to me to cast somebody because of who their father is because that doesn't put anyone in the seats in the theatre. I wouldn't go to a movie because that person's father is so and so.
Sometimes people are like, 'Do you want to play strong women?' I don't have to play strong women in order to feel like a strong woman myself, but I do feel it's important to play characters that are complex and interesting and believable.
I feel like I almost didn't grow up in the business, because my parents worked so hard at sheltering us from that. I was raised in Connecticut. And I honestly wasn't aware that my dad was a celebrity until I moved to Los Angeles a year ago.
My mum told me, 'At that moment when you know you can't do both, the marriage and the kids, choose the marriage because you're going to be spending your whole lives together, so you have to put a lot of work and attention into the relationship.'
On the spectrum of imagination, there are people who are more imaginative than others - I guess some kids are hardcore pretenders and have imaginary friends for years and other kids play and they have fun, but it's not quite as specific like that.
For me, whether or not a film has some kind of massive budget or is an independent film, or however it's getting made, it's always about the filmmaker and, hopefully, being a vessel for the filmmaker's vision. That's what really attracts me to projects.
I want to be the best actor that I can be; I want to be working in this business absolutely, and if that means being a movie star, then OK, that's fine. But to me, movie star, celebrity, all that stuff means something very different than being an actor.
There's a lot of wisdom that my dad and my grandparents and my uncle have been able to impart on me, and what I've treasured the most is I've seen examples in my life of people embracing their creativity, not feeling insecure about their artistic inclinations.
I can only really speak for myself and what I've noticed in my kids and the people in my life, but because dinosaurs were real, and yet they seem so fantastical, is why they held such a huge fascination for me as a child. They're so different from human beings.
I definitely managed to do different kinds of things. My focus is usually who the director is, because at the end of the day the director is the storyteller, what the movie is all about. I don't want to participate in something that I don't think is constructive storytelling.
But, working with directors whose history is in performance, I feel like there's a different kind of focus, as opposed to directors who are more prone to being really technically proficient or visual. I feel like there are two schools of both, and a director needs to have both.
Using the word 'bossy' for girls can be quite harmful. What is that saying - that being focused, being assertive, being the boss has a negative attribute? And I have heard that term associated more with women than with men. 'He's so bossy' - you don't hear that. It's a very subtle thing.
I thought that I had a really healthy relationship with food, and I went home to my parents' house for a week because I cut my foot, and was recovering. I just ate loads, ate family meals, went along with group activities. And I realized how unhealthy my relationship actually is with food.
I think what's exciting about playing a villain - particularly a villain who's totally unapologetic about their evil intentions - is that it's not anything remotely like what you get to do in real life. You're never allowed to be evil and not feel bad about it afterwards, let alone be evil, period.
With The Help, I knew folks involved in the project peripherally. I wanted to audition for Hilly Holbrook and part of the initial feedback was: "No, Bryce is too nice." That's part of the reason why I really love auditions as well - you get to try out a character and try out different versions of a character.
It's just that the characters are speaking their mind. As opposed to it just being an expression, they're actually saying what's on their mind, and that's something that Tennessee Williams is really famous for. Shakespeare does that and Tennessee Williams does that. You crave that, when you're an actor, for sure.
I didn't always want to act. My passion was writing, and it still is one of my primary passions to this day, but it wasn't until high school when I started acting in plays that it became a thought of something I might want to do. And when I applied to colleges, at NYU, I was able to study both writing and acting.
You need to not be able to do anything else, to be in this business. If you have other options, in those unemployed moments, those other options will take precedent. From a directorial standpoint, I think it's really Freudian, the amount of trust I have in filmmakers because I have such a trusting relationship with my dad.
To be perfectly honest, Christ Pratt is one of the greatest human beings I've ever met in my entire life. He really is. Everything about him was my favourite thing. I also really love how tall he is, 'cuz I'm kind of a tall girl and often times when I'm doing a movie I need to slouch, but I could stand tall and proud next to Chris Pratt.
I was in South Africa, and Joe [Wright] asked the same exact question that you just asked: "Have you ever seen an episode of Black Mirror?" I went back and played the video for Joe. The episode that I did is called "Nosedive," and it was a year to the week from when I first watched it. It was just very bizarre, this very weird coincidence.
In the beginning [of my social media life], I started posting and someone I'm close to said, "you're only posting pictures of yourself in your grungy pajamas. You're an actress be aspirational." Then I was like, "I'm not living an aspirational life on a day-to-day basis." For a while after that I was only taking pictures of, like, objects.
When people just become numbers, and we stop relating to each other as human beings. And we don't have the agency to make choices that can positively affect another human being. I was watching something yesterday where Justin Timberlake took a picture of himself voting, and he might get thirty days in jail because it's a new law or something.
I come from a little bit of a theatrical background. I started that way. I don't have a tremendous body of work or anything, but I went to drama school. And so, to get to do a piece where the characters get to talk a lot, and that isn't just about the spectacle or the set piece, or is simply visual or movement based. It was really wonderful for me, and juicy and exciting.
I didn't know how to check other people's feeds. When I started Instagram, it was just me posting! But then at some point, like eight months ago, I realized I could see what other people were sharing. It was so exciting and so fun, but it was like I'd already gotten into the rhythm of sharing and not worrying about what it was like compared to other accounts. I think that was kind of protective, in a way.
I started taping my dad's auditions when I was 11, when he was auditioning actors for one of his movies. I would see, over and over again, that there wasn't just one actor for the role. It was really clear that there were a lot of people who could play a character really well, and it would always come down to something kind of weird and non-obvious as to why a person was cast. If you're not right, you're not right, but that's okay.