A Quote by Anne-Marie Duff
There are some roles you just don't say 'no' to. Those compass points: you get them so rarely as an actress.
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You've heard the phrase 'There are no small roles, just small actors?' Well, I kind of disagree. There are small roles, but when you get a lot of them in a row, you can become a pretty successful actress, and that's what I've done.
There's plenty of girlfriend roles out there. They've come my way, and many people have turned them down, and I think, "Oh maybe I could do something with this." It's interesting when you get those roles, which seem like nothing on the page, and you kind of subvert them. It's hard to say no.
I just don't want to miss anything in the lives of my children while they are still young. It's why I don't audition for leading roles at all and why I say no to some of the supporting roles that I do get offered.
It's not like you do 'SNL' and then get handed movie roles. You work, you audition for stuff and try to get it. I think, a lot of people, it's the goal to be in movies or just to be working in general. But yeah, some of us get lucky and get some movie roles, and it's nice.
I had no idea of being a star, all I knew was that I wanted to be a great actress, I wanted to work as an actress. So I thought the way I would be a great actress was to sing and dance first. Lay a foundation - get my foot in the door, and then undoubtedly, of course, I would be offered great roles as soon as I grew up enough to handle them.
Theater roles are written by the great masters. The greatest literature that you can possibly know are the theater roles like King Lear, Hamlet, and all of those great roles. So all you do is you dive into these unchallenged roles and see how far you can get, what kind of accolades you can get, and how good you can be in them. In movie roles, you can actually improve them by knowing a lot about your own stage technique, which helps a great deal in the cinema and how you can project inner humor even though the particular dialogue is not necessarily funny, but you can infuse it with humor.
When you're a Black actress, the box that we often get put in is so small. And me being a dark-skinned Black actress, the opportunities become so limited in a way that is just wrong. It's not fair. I'm so capable of playing a wide variety of roles. It comes down to whether or not I'm given the opportunity to do it.
You could say I'm a character actress. Or maybe a character actress who does peculiar, interesting lead roles.
It's interesting when you get those roles, which seem like nothing on the page, and you kind of subvert them. It's hard to say no.
You have to get out of your comfort zone in order to grow. And as an actor, you don't become Meryl Streep by doing the same type of comedy. You get there by being challenged. And unfortunately, there's a lack of roles for women of color, so you actually have to be the engineer creating some of those roles.
He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and extract a motive power out of the greatest obstacles. Most begin to veer and tack as soon as the wind changes from aft, and as within the tropics it does not blow from all points of the compass, there are some harbors which they can never reach.
You absolutely feel, as a black actress, that you've got to ride the wave because there's just so few roles. I hate to play that card, but it's the truth. There's not a lot of roles.
Some of the supporting roles that I've done as an actor, I took them because I knew that I would get to watch some of the leading guys in the movies, and also I'd get to work with them.
The office of drama is to exercise, possibly to exhaust, human emotions. The purpose of comedy is to tickle those emotions into an expression of light relief; of tragedy, to wound them and bring the relief of tears. Disgust and terror are the other points of the compass.
A lot of the time, a moral compass is all that separates a hero from being a villain; otherwise, the two are very much the same. Both are generally the richest and most complex characters, and they get to have all the fun. I guess it's those types of roles that I ultimately gravitate towards.
I didn't want to be around anybody because it was just too much for my brain. But, as an actress, you hope you get those meaty roles that push you into the extremities of that psychology. I like doing independent films because there's more room for you to be creative, and the director allowed me to just go wherever I needed to go. It was emotional. I had to cry a lot.
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