You need to ask questions and you need to ask the right questions. Alan asked me how I saw the man and I said, ‘I saw him as Abraham Lincoln –- I don’t see him as a villain. This man is a hero with his agenda, with his point of view.’ I did not intend to play Clayton Townley as one chromosome short of a human being, like a lot of people will play various villains in movies … In real life, everyone kind of sees themselves as the good guy, doing what they’re doing. They see themselves as a kind of hero, and I wanted to make sure Clayton Townley … wasn’t played as some kind of genetic miscreant.

— Stephen Tobolowsky on playing the role of Ku Klux Klan leader Clayton Townley in “Mississippi Burning”

Actor Stephen Tobolowsky’s theory on the names of less important characters

If it’s a comedy, you get your job description and your first name like in ‘Wild Hogs’ I played Sheriff Charlie… If you are playing a serious role, you get the job description and your last name - Detective McClaren, Agent Jones. Now then there’s a level below that in which you get no name… You just get sometimes your job description - homeless man, man on train, man with a limp.

I can go into an audition with my makeup and my hair and my lashes and come out with these roles…. Which goes into the area of perception, and how people perceive black women of a certain hue, and when I say certain hue, I mean black women who are darker than a paper bag. And I’m a dark-skinned black woman who is 46 years old. And I don’t know about you, but when I go to see movies, I don’t see a lot of women like me in glamorous roles. Not in any mainstream movies, and inevitably when I say that people mention one person — but usually just one. I don’t see a lot of narratives written … where a woman who looks like me gets to be beautiful and sexualized and upwardly mobile, middle-class, funny, quirky. They’re very seldom written.

— Viola Davis on how people perceive her.

When I made The Devil Wears Prada, it was the first time in my life that a man came up and said, ‘I know how you felt. I have a job like that.’ First time. … For men, the favorite character that I’ve ever played is Linda in The Deer Hunter, without question. The heterosexual men that I’ve spoken to over the years, they say, ‘That’s my favorite thing you’ve ever done.’ Or Sophie. And they were a particular kind of feminine, recessive personalities. No question that this person was not going to dominate the conversation at a dinner party. So they fell in love with her, but they didn’t feel the story through her body.

— Meryl Streep, on how men view her roles

I think there was, for a long time in the movie business, a period of — when a woman was attractive and marriageable or f—-able, that was it. And then they didn’t know what to do with you until you were the lioness in winter, until you were 70 and then it was okay to do Driving Miss Daisy.

— Meryl Streep, on the roles actresses are offered in their 40s and 50s.

Michelle Williams on getting her GED at 15: “I feel like I missed out on a good education, but it’s a trade-off. The plus is that then afforded me 6.5 years of practice, of work and acting class, being on Dawson’s Creek and being able to experiment and say, ‘Am I better when I know all of my lines, and I’ve really known them?’ or ‘Am I better when I’m kind of off-balance a little bit because I’m tired?’ It’s that Malcolm Gladwell thing of 10,000 hours [to achieve proficiency in a subject]. I definitely have 10,000 hours in front of a camera, thanks to that show. So I got a different kind of education, but I do find myself — now I’m 30 — feeling frustrated with the limitations of my own mind.”

Jason Schwartzman: “I gave the script [of Rushmore] to my mom and I said ‘Mom, I’ve never auditioned. Can you give me any pointers? Can you help me memorize lines?’ and she read the script and she said ‘I’ll be right back’ and she went out and rented three films, The Graduate, Dog Day Afternoon, and Harold and Maude. And I watched them all for the first time. And it was in that moment where I felt, watching the films, this warm, insane feeling inside of my body which was a feeling that up until then music had given me. And it was in that moment where I said ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever get this part. I don’t know if my band will ever make it. But I’ve got to try to live my life somehow staying as close to this weird feeling as possible.’”