If you're a boxer, you want to get the ring with a Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali type. When you're acting, you want to get in with Meryl Streep, and that's what I did.
I'm sorry, if you've been married for five minutes, you've sacrificed something, you've looked over at your partner and have gone, "Oh my God this is the biggest mistake I've ever made in my life." And then the next moment it's "This is the most beautiful and extraordinary human being, and I'm going to stick with it because I love them more than anyone else." That monologue to me is the universal thing, especially for women because I feel like that's the big thing with women.
I think at the end of the day she [Rose from "Fences"] is a strong woman in the truest sense of the word. I think all of that is in the narrative; it's already there. The hope is there; the playfulness is there; it's there. I wish I could take credit for it, but it's there.
I would like to say something deeper, but for me, I saw a production of "Fences" in Rhode Island and a fabulous actress played Rose, but when she first came on the stage she was mad. You could just see it. She was all, "Troy stop!" So by the time you get to the revelation scene, I didn't think she loved him, so there was no loss. I think that the real tragedy and the real drama or the thing that makes you lean in is to see the love, to see the commitment. To see the fact that Rose is invested in this marriage no matter what.
I sort of feel like that's the most revolutionary thing we can do with our narrative for me as Black people is to show that we are just like you.
For me, that was a hard scene [in "Fences"] to do twenty-something times, which (laughing), I counted. That was difficult, but once I did it, I felt like I could do anything.
It was hard, that confrontation scene [in "Fences"], that was a hard one. I felt like it was relentless, I never felt like I could just drop the ball when the coverage was on him or anything else.
[Denzel Washington] was rustling with something and when he came back it was with a word about loving myself and the body that I'm in because I was still going on and on about the weight thing. I just liked that, because what people don't understand is that so much of what blocks us as actors is so personal.
I look back at pictures of myself and I remember thinking, "I was so fat when I was growing up. I was 165 pounds when I graduated from high school. I was a mess".
People often forget our emotional contribution to relationships and to marriage and that might be a completely sexist comment but, what I tried not to do [in "Fences"] is, I tried to just put that monologue as part of my stream of consciousness.
Each character has their own challenges. The challenge to doing one scene is your whole history of who you are and your relationships, you only have this one shot.
When you shoot a scene, you remember every moment. You remember when your head went down, your head went up. You don't see little quirks, little eye movements, little lip movements. Once again, you become completely vain when you're watching it in a way that you weren't when you were shooting it. And the vanity, what it makes you focus on are everything that has nothing to do with the scene and everything to do with your own ego.
I had several teachers who inspired me, in both the public school system and the Upward Bound program. I needed several, because I lived in such abject poverty and dysfunction. And they're still in my life today, because I consider them to be friends, actually.
On stage you never watch yourself. You just experience it, and then you go home, and you feel pretty good if you gave a pretty good performance or crappy if you didn't. But in TV and film, you actually have to experience it while you're doing it, and then you have to watch it. And then when you're watching it, you watch it with a different sensibility than how you experienced it.
It's harder to play a quiet character because everything happens in their stream of consciousness. They're thinking and feeling the world, but they're saying very little, so then you have to communicate it through your behavior.
You don't get the pay-off when you're playing a quiet character, so sometimes you want to just throw out all your work and say, "Okay, let me do something really funny or gimmicky, just so that I can get some attention in this scene."
It's always hard to be private in public, which is what acting is because you have to do thing really emotionally naked.
You absolutely feel, as a black actress, that you've got to ride the wave because there's just so few roles. I hate to play that card, but it's the truth. There's not a lot of roles.
When you're working as an actor, you don't think that when you get out of school, it's going to be so hard to get a job. Just to get a job. Any job. Whatsoever. You don't think that people are going to see you in a certain way.
No matter what, people don't think of me for glamorous parts. I'll go to an audition or a meeting in a pretty dress, and they still think of me as depressed or embattled. Hopefully, that will change.
It made me realize again how complicated being a mother is. You have 50 million heartbreaking moments, and 100 million beautiful, joyous ones.
I think that's something that people feel that I do really well; I don't mind it, because ultimately I think the characters I play move people, and who wouldn't want to move people?
