The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it’s a completely random process.
What makes you different or weird, that’s your strength.
When I was in – at Vassar, and I came from a public high school in New Jersey, there was – that class still existed. I think it’s pretty much gone, but there was a way of talking that the private school girls had that was different than the way I talked from New Jersey.
In my own life, I have noticed when I have been meeting directors, that the same sentence with the same inflection can be said by a man, like: “Get me this.” But if the same thing is said by a woman, it’s seen as harsh and unacceptable. That always fascinates me.
I am not always happy. I am happy in front of the press. I can be extremely grumpy, ask my husband.
I think it is typical for many men to have problems when their wives make more money then they do, or when their wives are higher on the corporate ladder than they find themselves. I think that often is an issue.
When my children were very young and I was working I had someone cooking for me. I don’t have a cook now, I haven’t had one for a number of years and I do it myself. But when they were all little it was hard to pay attention to everyone’s homework at the end of the day and make dinner.
You didn’t have to work to keep your fear up, your energy up, or your anxiety. It is all kind of built into the process.
I separated myself in Prada because I didn’t want to have fun. They were all having a lot of fun – Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci – and they were a little coterie of laughs.
I don’t think we can say that all working women will get divorced – it’s so dangerous to make these things emblematic of anything – but having said that, every person who has a big, important job and tries to have a family, has to make decisions every single minute.
Sometimes it’s easier for people who are in authority to be authoritarian, because people know where you stand.
Most of the great practitioners of the art of acting know exactly what they’re doing; even in the best, most successful moments, when they let go of the awareness of what they are doing, they still, somewhere deep inside their body, know what they’re doing. There is a craft.
You can be afraid in a press conference, nervous, sweaty, but you can’t be afraid when you do your work because it doesn’t work that way.
I get nervous the more time I have to think about something so I deliberately don’t give myself too much time between jobs. I take a big break and then I start working again usually.
I don’t have a favorite director just like I don’t have a favorite color or I don’t have a favorite food. I like everything.
I do honestly think that if women were running the world there would be more investment in peace, because basically as women we do not want to see our children killed. Maybe I am completely idealistic, but until we see women in equal positions of power in the world, I just think that we are doomed.
I think that we pay much more attention to fashion and our hair, skin and foreheads, our abdominal muscles and shoes than what is happening in the world. We willingly take that ‘drug’ and go along with that.
The thing that you have to fight the most when you lose is you feel like the biggest failure in the world.
I don’t have time to read a lot. And when I do, I read things that have just the facts.
There have been directors that I did not enjoy working with, but for the most part I realize that I have been unbelievably spoiled in my career because I have worked with some of the greatest, greatest directors ever.
I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me.