Explore Quotes on Roles

I always get cast as the girl who's dying or the girl who's killing or the girl who's suicidal - all these heavy roles. But I like playing them.

That's the joy of getting to be an actor - getting to play all kinds of different roles and showing so many different sides of yourself.

The kids can see that there are more parts to me than just being their mom; I wear a couple of different hats and have other roles to play.

The acting bug just seemed to stick with me. I loved going to theatre school in college and continued to train in film classes and had been auditioning for T.V. and movie roles since I was in my late teens. My career has been slow and steady, and I kind of like it that way.

Television can be a little tricky in terms of finding roles that feel fully flushed out, which is why I love being in the theater so much, because the roles tend to be really on the page.

I think that people are most comfortable when they can put you in a box - and that's very easy to do that when someone can put you in more serious roles. I'm not blaming them for that - it's just up to me to show people what I can do.

If you listen to my music, that's everything I stand for: women being free about their sexuality, flipping the industry's gender roles and society's gender roles and just being as confident as you can be with yourself, your sexuality.

I try to do justice to whatever roles I take up and it really doesn't bother me whether I am paired opposite a superstar or a newcomer.

At the end of the day we need to experiment and if we start being too cautious, we'll end up working with the same actors and doing the same roles. That's how people get stereotyped.

I'm so bored of reading scripts with these wonderfully complex male roles, yet the woman character just sits on the bed waiting for him to come home.

There's talk of the lack of roles for older women. It's so tough and it's soul-destroying what some female actors do to their faces to try and keep producers happy.

Sherlock' changed the perception of me. I have these cheekbones and this face that suggest very middle-class or period-drama roles. I want to show everyone there's much more to me than Irene Adler.

Throughout my career, I wouldn't say my roles have been based on my being considered eye candy.

On 'Swingtown,' I think that's when I was able to blend the character-slash-leading lady roles, and that's what I'm doing on 'Once Upon a Time' as well. She's a leading lady, but she's also this character.

That's always a fun thing to play, a relationship where there's equals. I often play roles that are repressive, or women who are slightly repressed or having some kind of internal conflict.

It's funny, oftentimes the really great roles that I enjoy are in classic plays, and there aren't many theatres in New York who will do them, aside from Roundabout.

When I started acting, my whole focus and intention was to work as a stage actor in a company where you're asked to different roles - do a comedy, do a tragedy, etc. I haven't had any reservations about jumping from one type of genre to another.

Coming up through the theater in America, while I have had success, I have had success in certain types of roles.

The majority of the roles I've played are women who have been either impoverished or subjugated in some way. So while I've been fortunate enough to have success because these roles exist, they are stereotypical roles.

I am an African-American woman of dark skin tone, and there are very specific roles that are usually given to African-American women of a darker hue. Let's start with 'Once on This Island': peasant girl. Let's go to 'The Color Purple': young girl, beaten. Let's go to 'Ragtime': Her baby's taken.

We still have to create things for African American women. Just like Tyler Perry is doing it, we can't wait for things to happen; you have to go and make and create roles and go to people.