That's the main thing, looking for interesting characters, good directors, and experiences where you're growing and learning.
The most interesting thing to me is that 'The Walking Dead' is a show that reinvents itself every eight episodes. It's an evolving landscape. There are characters that die. There are characters that stay on. There are characters that go away. I love that.
Who wants to be used? I love to read, so books are my main friends. They're always available, always friendly, and always interesting, and they never make me choose sides.
Well, sometimes love seems easy. Like..it's easy to love rain...and hawks. And it's easy to love wild plums...and the moon. But with people, seems like love's a hard thing to know. It gets all mixed up. I mean, you can love one person in one way and another person in another way. But how do you know you love the right one in every way?
I think it's interesting playing characters who are flawed and make mistakes because we all have - no one's just one thing - no one is just bad or just good - so I like finding flawed characters and playing with their redeeming qualities, whether you play it outwardly or not. I think that one of the reasons I'm an actor is that I love people and I love finding out who they are and why they do the things they do, so it is fun to play those kinds of characters.
Make sure your characters are worth spending ten hours with. That’s how long it takes to read a book. Reading a book is like being trapped in a room for ten hours with those characters. Think of your main characters as dinner guests. Would your friends want to spend ten hours with the characters you’ve created? Your characters can be loveable, or they can be evil, but they’d better be compelling. If not, your reader will be bored and leave.
I always tell my students to complicate your characters: never make it easy for the reader. Nobody is ever one thing. That's what makes characters compelling.
I can't judge the characters I play, because it's for the audience to do. What I can try to do is to understand and embody what were they going through? How did they make the decisions they made? That to me is a more interesting way to approach something, rather than saying this person is a villain and that person is this and - because it's not very interesting to play that anyway.
Things that matter are not easy. Feelings of happiness are easy. Happiness is not. Flirting is easy. Love is not. Saying you’re friends is easy. Being friends is not.
I know it's a bit of an awful thing to say, but I really just make things up. My main goal is to make a picture that people find interesting to look at and that has my name on it.
If you want to learn to love, then you must start the process of finding out what it is, what qualities make up a loving person and how these are developed. Each person has the potential for love. But potential is never realized without work.
On the surface, it's really easy to dismiss certain characters, but sometimes you find that the most interesting parts are disappointingly shallow. It's your job as an actress to pull that person apart, and work out why they act the way that they do.
I could hold on to everything for the rest of my life. I don't make friends easy, and I don't lose friends easy.
I'm working to create a space where it feels easy to include and imagine black girls and make black girls like me the main characters of our lives.
The interesting thing about a lot of serialized television is that it's a blessing and curse. Smart writers really take their time in investing in backstories and characters. As a viewer, you have to invest in them and love them before you can chip away at what's going on more on a deeper level with secondary characters.
I just love to act. It's my favorite thing to do in the world, and what keeps it interesting, to me, is the creative challenge. So, different kinds of characters, that's what I just love to do.