Regardless of the project, whenever you're working on something, the best you can hope for is to be around good people.

People talk about Jim Crow as if it's dead. Jim Crow isn't gone. It's adjusted. Look at the disproportionate sentences meted out to blacks caught up in the criminal justice system. There's a problem when people profit from putting and keeping African Americans in prison. We need to do a better job as a nation understanding the real values the country's built upon in terms of fairness, equality and equal opportunity.

Even afterwards when you go through a scene and then step off, sometimes you need a minute to just decompress.

With any good projects, I feel like the off-screen chemistry factors on-screen. It's great when you don't have to force it, but when it's not there you better focus on getting there, because as we live with these characters we spend more time with one another than we do our families at home.

I'd like to think that in any circumstance I'd say, "You know what? Screw this. Kill me. I'm done. I'm not going to grovel."

It's important for us to vote in mid-term off year elections in the times where state legislators and mayors offices are being vacated. These are the elections that actually impact the way we live oftentimes more than the President. So we have to pay attention to those things as well.

I remember my mom had a conversation with Sam Jackson about what she should do with our careers and what the next step should be; I was eight and my brother was nine. He said, "You need to get them on Broadway."