I may be the only actress in Hollywood who won't need a face lift, because when I take off my makeup, I look so great compared to my characters!
Theresa Rebeck's writing is so scarily funny. I just love how unapologetic she is with her writing: she doesn't try to make her characters likeable or heroic, she just really makes them human. Hopefully, the audience is able to love them in the end - or have whatever feelings that they want to have about all of them - but I love that she doesn't have that agenda. That is something that, as an actress, was really appealing to me; to just get to be in this group of people who are complicated and very human.
I had lived in France before graduate school, but because of Spain, I had a lot of the characters go and spend a good bit of time in Spain.
Usually, the creating of the book happens while I'm writing the book. I start with Chapter One, with a few ideas and a handful of characters, and the book grows from there.
Everything was just so spot on and character-building for me in terms of creating Celia [Bryant]. The ability to get to wear all these vintage pieces and immerse yourself in that world and get to wear all these amazing hats. And the shoes!
It's actually a character choice for a movie I've been filming in South Korea called Okja. My director had this idea of having my hair be a very vibrant red/pink/watermelon color. We haven't finished filming so I'm kind of riding the wave of the red hair right now in terms of everything else that I have to do with The Last Tycoon press and you know, regular life. I'm really loving it. It's turning into a thing for me.
I still think there is a huge emphasis on how women look, whether it's fitting a certain mold to play a certain type of character, or the idea that we might have insecurities based on the standards we see in the media.
Interesting, isn't it, that even though more than two and a half decades have passed since the sexual revolution brought women a new measure of sexual freedom, there's still no word in the language that doesn't reek with pejorative connotation to describe a woman who has sex freely. Since language frames thought and sets its limits, this is not a trivial matter. For without a word that describes without condemning, it's hard to think about it neutrally as well. When we say the words 'promiscuous woman,' therefore, it's a statement about her character, not just her sexual behavior.
It's always difficult to say goodbye, especially when one has spent a long time - literally years, in the case of a series - inside a character or two, suffering and celebrating with them.
I guess the characters I play may be at the more destructive edge of the spectrum, more damaged or whatever, but I find a lot of female roles uninteresting.
I'm a typically lazy person. It is sort of characteristic of actors.
You always have to create the character from the ground up.
I want to forget what I've learned about the character, but the reality is that you can't, because you've absorbed it. It's there in that moment when you need it. The hard part is to trust it.
If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.
I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities and contradictions and beauty and violence and stench and desire and astonishing physicality of the body back into literature.
When a female character sets herself on fire in an effort to interrupt her culture's violent abuse of disenfranchised people, or physically tortures and punishes her guardian rapist, or picks up a gun and fights back in ways that make her not pretty, or aggressively rejects her role as the object of desire, or even when she waddles off into the woods to squat and have a baby without the safety and expertise of hospitals and doctors, these are the kinds of violences and stories we can learn from.
We can't handle violence in women characters but we CAN handle what's done to women in our present tense every second of the day worldwide? Or next door? Or in political or medical discourse? Please. That idea just makes me want to crap on a table at a very fancy restaurant.
One path I've used a lot is to deeply and thoughtfully consider a trope or a tradition, and then set about taking it apart - but only in the service of a character or story that deserves it. Another path I often employ is to put form into "play" - to set it free from its ordinary constraints and let it be free-floating and broken-apart and rearranged.
One of the things that bugs me about the Western Literary Tradition is that the conventions of narrative in particular seem to confine the stories you can tell about characters to tropes of bone-headed action and old models of psychological realism. And as readers, too, we have been conditioned to understand characters as - and forgive me for saying it out loud - what the market says they should be. Namely, safe, clean, proper.
I think the best models are actors, you're taking on a character. In that sense, I have been acting for a long time. It didn't seem like a crazy transition. Acting is a bigger step into modelling in a way. Modelling is easier when you don't look like yourself. When you look like a different person, you feel different. Acting goes deeper into that, you have to move and talk like that character. I love it.
There is a time in every life when paths are chosen, character is forged. I could have chosen a different path. But I didn’t. I failed myself.
A good novelist loves all of his characters, he lives in them, even in those who commit or must commit terrible acts.
Google is my best friend and my worst enemy. It's fabulous for research, but then it becomes addictive. I'll have a character eating an orange, and next thing I'm Googling types of oranges, I'm visiting chat rooms about oranges, I'm learning the history of the orange.
It is fun to explore these kick-butt characters.
I don't want to be reincarnated, that's for sure. When you've had rewarding experiences in your life - a loving family, friends - you don't need additional reassurances that you're going to do something with a new cast of characters. I'd just as soon pass.
