My favorite roles usually have to do with the story, if it's a good story I usually enjoy doing the character.
There are some times when I think acting can be a noble profession. And when those rare roles come along, like 'Down to the Bone,' you have the opportunity to be of service.
I never played the right roles, or very rarely got the right roles offered, except on stage.
What I love about my job is challenging myself and finding weird, different roles.
All my cop/gangster dramas have been spaced out, but somewhere, the films in which I played the bad guy were extremely successful, so people are under the impression that I play only such roles. I call it selective amnesia.
I like the full spectrum of roles.
I think my experience as an actor helps me to write anything. It certainly helped me to write 'August Osage County.' It helps me to write any play that I'm working on because I think one of the things I do well is write good roles for actors.
In the kind of roles I do, you can do them and walk away from it and have a really nice time.
Knowing that Gene and Morgan were playing those roles made it much easier to put the script together-we knew who we were writing it for. It took some mystery away.
I always like to play roles where I either love the character or think that it's a story that I can tell better than anyone else. There are always reasons for me to do whatever I do.
It is not easy to age in harmony with one's roles.
As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.
I relate to people and roles that are about the arc of human experience, things that everyday people deal with every day.
I am done with the cliched heroine roles. I can't go to work without a challenge. I want to do films that drive me, films in which I am a part of the main plot.
I loved working with Valerie. That was the most wonderful revelation to find that when we are on a set and we're playing our roles, we're like separated twins. We can almost finish each other's dialogue.
It is women who have traditionally, historically been given non-human roles, perceived as simply the daughters of Eve, perceived as either Madonna or whore. And I think that it is the sexual revolution that plays one part in female emancipation.
It is to TV that I owe my freedom from bondage of the Latin lover roles. Television came along and gave me parts to chew on. It gave me wings as an actor.
I'm playing one of the principal roles, which gives you more clout and more confidence.
There's sort of a very symbiotic thing that happens on good TV shows with great writers, which is that they start to sort of embrace who the actors are and try to make the roles more specific to what they bring and what they can do.
The girl-next-door image is a sort of joke; for years, I couldn't get any roles other than as somebody dark.
There is such a cliche to certain roles that all I can do is to try to make them realistic and work for the times, and so the audience actually won't see me as a caricature of something, but rather as an actual person.
When younger, I was thin as a rail. As I've grown older, I've put on weight. I have continued to love myself in all those roles. Part of my spirituality, I always tell people, is to accept yourself for who you are.
I'm always attracted to anti-hero roles.
Well, this is an unfortunate part of the UN institution. It's the - the theater of the absurd. It doesn't only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles: Gadhafi's Libya chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights; Saddam's Iraq headed the UN Committee on Disarmament.
There are definitely a lot of roles I didn't get based off of the way I look, but I'm not going to let that stop me. I'm going to write stories for myself or work with filmmakers who want to tell stories about real people.
I think in the acting world you either manage that transition to older roles, or you stick with what you've always done and then discover nobody can bear you doing it as an older person.
Acting is sort of an extension of childhood. You get to play all of these roles and have so much fun. Playing an athlete would be so cool. Or where you get to shoot guns, ride horses. I wouldn't turn down any of that.
I've been really fortunate to be able to do different kinds of films in different scales, different genres, different kinds of roles, and that is important to me.
I believe that every role that I have done this far has had quality and content. My roles have been very demanding and every role has been a challenge and a learning experience that has helped me mature as an actress.
I have a friend who says that roles choose you at the time that you need them most, and you have to believe, as an actor, if you didn't get a part that you really, really wanted, and it went to someone else, it was because it was theirs to begin with.
Because of fear, and the way my career went, I started playing a lot of villainous roles.
I've always waitressed between roles. When 'Black Mirror' was on, I was still flipping burgers. Customers would recognise me while asking for extra ketchup, which was pretty embarrassing.
I think when I first started acting there were different people who I thought, 'I want that person's career or that person's career.' And as time has gone on, it's become really clear to me what is important to me; getting the best roles, the roles that I feel are challenging and scary and that I haven't done yet.
It would be naive to imagine we have solved all our income security problems simply because the roles of the federal and provincial governments in the area of skills training have been clarified.
The 'Family Ties' role was the first of many gay roles that I've ended up playing. I remember that I made them laugh, and it made me feel good, 'cause it really cracked them up.
These same people seem to forget that mother also took a lot of chances with the type of roles she played.
