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What we try to do in TSAW, which is Tasha Smith Actors Workshop, is to help the actor get to the core of who they really are and how they really feel. So, we may have them do a dump, where you just basically express everything that you feel that you have not been able to express, whether it's good, bad, or ugly.
Chris was involved in that casting process. It was a different feel because New Moon was the first time that the Wolf Pack got together. With Eclipse, we were already established, so I didn't have that same bond or connection with David. It was very technical. He had a vision and an idea of what he wanted to do.
Jean-Luc Godard saw me in a commercial. He first asked me to play a little part in 'Breathless' of a girl who is taking her clothes off. I said, 'No, I don't want to take my clothes off.' But he called me again for 'Le Petit Soldat.' He said it was a political film, so I didn't have to take my clothes off at all.
There's no such thing as too late. There are different roles for different ages, assuming an actress has something to offer. There aren't many Helen Mirrens and Meryl Steeps, and it takes a lot of talent to get to that level. I hope I have it. That's the model I aspire to if I'm lucky enough. It's all about luck.
It's just that the characters are speaking their mind. As opposed to it just being an expression, they're actually saying what's on their mind, and that's something that Tennessee Williams is really famous for. Shakespeare does that and Tennessee Williams does that. You crave that, when you're an actor, for sure.
I didn't always want to act. My passion was writing, and it still is one of my primary passions to this day, but it wasn't until high school when I started acting in plays that it became a thought of something I might want to do. And when I applied to colleges, at NYU, I was able to study both writing and acting.
I was lucky enough to be able to do comedies, dramas, completely different parts. At the beginning, when you start you have a fantasy that you could be somebody else. Which is absurd. That's part of being an actor. It's your voice, it's the way you move, it's your body, even if you transform it, you play with it.
Throughout my career I've played a lot of parts that might've been played by a man. They're human roles rather than specifically men or women. I've never been as hooked into that as a lot of women are, you know, like, 'There aren't enough roles for women.' There aren't necessarily a lot of good roles for anybody.
Majorca is this destination where, you know, you have a lot of money, but you want to go somewhere quite exclusive. And the culture of the island is still traditionally Spanish. It hasn't been infested by tourists. I think, in the '20s or something, an extremely wealthy person built this little kingdom of villas.
For film, I think because it's more detailed, and especially with historical material, you really have to find the right projects. Speaking as a mixed-race woman, there aren't many historical stories about people like me. When people think of 'dual heritage,' they think it's a modern concept, but really it's not.
My identity was a big issue when I was a teenager, and I had a lot of questions, like: 'Who am I?' 'Who do I belong to?' But when I was still quite young, I decided that belonging is a tough process in life, and I'd better say I belonged to myself and the world rather than belonging to one nationality or another.
I want to clear this once and for all. I was born in Hong Kong. I grew up in Japan and China. London is not home for me. I was there only for three years before I moved to India, but that's probably why I am connected with it. London is definitely not the place I consider my home. It's India that I consider home.
Movies are great fun and wonderful when they're good. But you never get to see them till six months after they're finished. So you never get a sense of whether they're really well liked or how good they are. And you don't really know what the finished product is going to be like, because it's a director's medium.
The steadily inward look leads us all to death, nations as well as persons, and is equally infantile in them all. Perhaps the most useful thing I have learned in my lifetime is that the process of maturing gradually turns the mind away from the small-self to the greater-self that is only served by serving others.
I love television because it's the most alive, because you don't know how it's going to end. It's a living thing. Sometimes the writers are watching you to see how things will unfold. Sometimes the writers have written it, and you come to it, and they have to change their way of going because of what you've done.
Right now I'm in 'Twilight' and I go around to signings and there are people screaming and crying, and it's so surreal. I know that when this is over in a month or two and whenever 'Twilight''s no longer relevant, that doesn't live on for me. It's because of this. It's not very often that this happens for people.
I didn't want to be looked at. I remember when I was six or seven asking my mom why people were looking at me. She said, 'They're looking at you because you're a beautiful little girl.' But I didn't believe her. And yet I put myself in a business where people have to look at you. I think I learnt to block it out.
I played a lesbian reporter in 1964, who was incarcerated, and ended the series as a 75-year-old woman. And then, I was a witch blinded by acid who became the Supreme, and took my mother's energy and life, so that I could live and she would die. And then, I was conjoined twins. And then, I played a heroin addict.
Films and life are like clay, waiting for us to mold it. And when you trust your own insides and that becomes achievement, it's a kind of principle that seems to me is at work with everyone. God bless that principle. God bless that potential that we all have for making anything possible if we think we deserve it.
During my senior year, I was supposed to spend a semester student teaching, but decided I couldn't be a teacher. My aunt Beth's friend was Jackie Gleason's daughter, Linda Miller. She encouraged me to talk to her. After doing that, she recommended Catholic University's M.F.A. acting program. So that's what I did.
I was so grateful to work on 'Bunheads.' We had so much material, and everything was so rapid-fire, and I developed - through theater too, I developed a really great work ethic. I think preparing for both of them is just that - you come to set ready to go, ready to play. You know your lines. You're ready to work.
From the moment my dad died, from the moment I found out there was the possibility of his dying, there were many surprises - years after, minutes after. The moments I was okay were as surprising as the ones that I wasn't. Making it through the eulogy without losing it. And then the guilt I felt about it. Surprise!
People say to me 'You're a big Hollywood star', and I find it so funny. I still feel as though I'm the girl from Golders Green. I lead such a boring, normal life. I still go shopping in Sainsbury's. If the ability to do that was taken away from me, I'd go barmy. You lose your freedom. Be careful what you wish for.
You get stared at the whole time. I first noticed that when I was about 13. I was very shy. Being considered beautiful, I always felt that people were waiting for something more. I imagined you were supposed to have an intellectual ability - and I'm making no claims here - proportional to your supposed good looks.
I have learned never to judge any of the characters that I portay. Sometimes that is difficult to do because as a human being we tend to make judgements when we find out information about people and situations. In order to bring a character to life, though, I find that I cannot judge her or I won't be true to her.
I have talked to women who do yoga, who are vegan, who have never smoked and/or never drank a day in their life, but they have Stage IV breast cancer. So you do what you can to be as healthy as you can if you know you're high-risk because yes, all those things can factor into that. But sometimes it's just a fluke.
I've never been able to keep track of an umbrella, but then my dad gave me this fancy umbrella. It was in his car, and I had again lost some awful Duane Reade disaster umbrella. It was my first adult umbrella that wasn't from a drugstore, and I have left it all over New York, and every time, I went back to get it.
I didn't really like reading much before I did 'The Golden Compass'. But then my teacher told me to read it. And I thought, 'Oh God, I'm going to have to read a whole book by myself!' It's not that I couldn't read, it's just that I didn't really like books very much. But the book that she lent me I really enjoyed.
I've also learned to no longer feel guilty if I'm invited out and don't want to go. If I start to say to myself, 'What's wrong with you that you're staying in five nights in a row to watch 'Forensic Files' instead of going out with your friends' I remind myself that it's what I need to do for myself at that point.
Granted, it's not easy to be a super-tall woman in Hollywood. But there are times when it works in my favour. In 'The Night Manager,' for example, both of my co-stars, Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston, are also well over 6 ft. and it was lovely to look a co-star in the eye and not have them standing on an apple box!
Watching and learning from the great Josette Bushell-Mingo, who was playing Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra at the time, and then to return to the same stage six months later playing a lead role, was incredible - I fell in love with the poetry and the breadth of the language so much that I didn't want it to end.
I would love to be a field biologist. I would love to do what Jane Goodall did, just totally immerse myself in the life of one specific species for years and study every aspect of its behavior until little by little, all of these patterns become clear. That would be great, but I don't know if I have it left in me.
One would expect an actress to stand onscreen mostly as a caricature. If she would say, "I'm selling shoes," you would believe her. She says it and it creates this fiction, non-fiction perception of the film. People believe it because she says it. If she said, "I'm a butcher," people would believe it too, I think.
My agent asked if I fancied Robin Hood and I thought: 'Yeah, why not?' I hadn't watched it, to be honest, but I'd seen bits and knew it was really popular Saturday family viewing with heaps of action. I thought it would be great fun. I was up for a good old play-fighting and the scripts were terrifically exciting.
Acting was always something I pursued by myself. When we were in college, I took an acting class that I was so passionate about and devoted to, but I went to it privately and never really spoke about it. I'd have these ecstatic experiences in, like, a church basement and then never talk about it with other people.
I have a theory that there's almost this primal viewpoint on women in the business, that once you're beyond childbearing age, you are perceived as nonthreatening, nonsexual, noncastable. Sure, I already knew it before I got into it. I just didn't know I'd end up making my living from low-budget, independent films.
My granny was very concerned that we weren't baptised - Mum had been desperate to escape her own Catholic upbringing. But Granny thought we were blighted. Whenever we turned up at her house, she would flick holy water - from the font she kept by the door - over us, in the hope that it would save us from damnation.
Making African American films are hard in Hollywood. We need to rely on a support network and bring more cohesion to different filmmakers, actors, producers etc. It's a very difficult business. There aren't a lot of Africans Americans or people of color in high positions in Hollywood that we can green-light films.
I saw several actresses play the part. I did not in fact, as far as I know, do anything that any of the other actresses did. I don't think actresses do that. I think that what we do is we see a role as a role, we don't see it as a person. We look at the role and think, 'What can I, as an actor, bring to that part?
I play guitar, the ukulele and the piano. I grew up on a mountain in Tennessee, and we had 'The Mountain Opry,' where anyone could just get up on stage to perform. It was just about the soul and heart of music. My upbringing was less about being great and more about just doing what you love. It was always for joy.
I auditioned for 'Loving' two years before we started shooting, so in the hopes that I would be playing Mildred, I watched it again. Also it's one of the best documentaries I've seen. I found this couple interminably fascinating; even if I didn't get the part, I just wanted to know more about them and their story.
When I speak of family, I immediately think of a support system who can give you a reality check when you need it: a mirror reflection of myself. I believe that we are a result of our family - the people who encourage us and tell us the truth about who we are which helps us to grow through their advice and wisdom.
Environmental policies are not just about good publicity; they are about responding to the moral imperative to address both climate change and resource depletion...A company culture that is based on measuring everything in purely financial terms will be crippled by a high turnover of staff, customers and suppliers
I was a pen pal with one guy, a long time ago. I think we only wrote to each other twice. We didn't really keep it up that long. But, I love it. I think it's really sweet and very creative and freeing, when you get to put a pen to paper, 'cause you don't really do it that much these days, with all this technology.
I did an episode on the TV show 'Awake,' and I thought, 'Wow, that's really hard.' To do that so fast and to do that, if it's very successful, for nine months out of the year, for a bunch of good years, that's challenging. But, it was interesting. It's a good show. You'd have to have a very good character, I guess.
I knew that life itself was this journey, and I've always seen it as a kind of school in that we're meant to have fun, and we're meant to grow, and we're meant to evolve and learn to be better humans and how to love each other better and how to love ourselves and become a part of a community of love on this planet.
I've always thought - and I don't even know if I'd be right for the part - that Jean Seberg would make a great biopic. She was in Jean-Luc Godard's 'Breathless,' she played Joan of Arc. She had this eventful and traumatic adulthood, she thought the FBI was after her, and she became a darling of the French New Wave.
I am short, so even if there are things that I like, or like on other people, I have to be aware that sometimes that won't work on me because I'm not 5'10. It has to have a shape for my body; otherwise, I look like I am two inches tall. I have to wear things that skim my body more closely than a runway model would.
There's not a formula that I'm following; it's just how I feel at the time. For instance, I did a very experimental film called 'Hardcore Henry,' and that was simply because I thought the filmmaker was very interesting and a risk taker. A film like that had never been made before, so I chose to do that at the time.
I have never written a book about my life, despite being offered purses of gold. I made 'Boxes' because I wanted to make a sincere depiction of a daughter who has lost her father, or the jealousy one can feel towards a daughter who has become more beautiful than you and whose stepfather starts to take her shopping.