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I come from the theater and I plan to always do theater. So I don't really see myself not being able to act even if people don't think I am sexy enough for film at 40, I'll still be acting.
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I always prided myself on the fact that I could live out of milk crates forever. It was kind of my way of detaching from materialism.
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I really gravitate toward having all different styles in my closet because I feel like I always want to dress to fit my mood or where I am going. I do love Jason Wu; he is also a really good friend of mine, and I love what he is doing for Hugo Boss these days.
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I've been wanting to produce for some time because I want to have more creative control over the things that I do and not be victim to the whims of other people's desires.
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My mother is one of seven kids, so I have a lot of strong women in my family, and I have supportive, beautiful relationships with all of them.
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I'm doing this play right now, the new David Mamet play. It's called 'Race,' and it's very interesting how people really leave the theater filled with the desire to talk about the play and the issues and the characters, and how they're all navigating their personal views around race.
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In real life, I'm just an actor. I play pretend. I tell stories.
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When you buy into the cultural idea of what's acceptable and unacceptable, you reinforce negative stereotypes and prejudices. That wouldn't work for me. I don't love to give advice to anyone, because we all have to make our own choices, but I'd want to live my life in truth.
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Before 'Scandal,' I was actually cast in two other pilots. Both went to series, but I was fired and recast. For both, it was because they wanted me to sound more 'girlfriend,' more like 'hood,' more 'urban.'
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I think sometimes in life we want to ignore the problems of society and just think about the good. I believe in positive thinking and affirmative living, I also think it's really important to remember all of our disenfranchised members of society.
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I have girlfriends in this business who talk about their personal lives, and it works for them, and I love it. But not for me.
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I wouldn't just come home from school and watch TV everyday, they had me involved in lots of local theatre. I was a very dramatic, talkative child. And that was part of my mother's creative solution - to put me in workshops and classes and children's theatre programmes.
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I have to take care of myself in order to live life the way I want to. It's important to have rest days. But in the long run, if I don't work out for, like, three days, I feel worse, not better.
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It's interesting how much people long to fill in the gaps when someone in the public eye doesn't share their personal life. I understand their frustration.
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I learned through experience that it doesn't work for me to talk about my personal life. I've had earlier times in my career when I did talk about it.
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I feel like any single woman of color who's been onstage has a Shakespeare monologue in her back pocket, and a monologue from 'For Colored Girls.' It's just part of what you should have, as a woman of color.
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Shoes define how you walk in the world and how you stand: like, what is your posture in life?
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You may not be thinking about politics, but politics is thinking about you.
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I didn't grow up thinking I was pretty; there was always a prettier girl than me. So I learned to be smart and tried to be funny and develop the inside of me, because I felt like that's what I had.
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About a year ago I got really exhausted from reading bad scripts and I know that I am a writer and that I have stories to tell, so I thought, 'Let's do this!' So I'm co-writing a screenplay now with another screenwriter and loving it. Absolutely loving it. And I would like to be the producer on the project and of course the lead is me.
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So many struggled so that all of us could have a voice in this great democracy and live up to the first three words of our constitution: We the people. I love that phrase so much. Throughout our country's history, we've expanded the meaning of that phrase to include more and more of us. That's what it means to move forward.
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I'm always working. My cousins call me the longshoreman of actors.
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There are a lot of forms of exercise where you have to leave yourself out of the room while you force yourself to do this thing. With Pilates, I get to bring my true self. I cry, I laugh. I get to go, 'Where is my body today? What do I need today? How can I take care of myself and push myself past my comfort zone?'
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Being the one woman in the room should not be seen as a victory. If there's only one of us in the room, we're still a token; we don't actually have an empowered voice. If there's two of us, we're still a minority. If there's three, then we're allowed to have a multiplicity of opinions.