When you're playing Shakespeare, it forces you to think and feel and speak all at the same time, which really is what acting is. It expands your imagination and expands your size of thinking.

Historically it has been a touchy subject, especially in the south where I am from, people don't really talk about it. If they do talk about it, it is often talked about negatively. Nowadays in light of the Black Lives Matter movement I think people should pay attention to these lives also. I think the Black community will really embrace the film [Moonlight]. It is about us. It is real.

There are so many brilliant, trained actors of color in America. If you just think about it, every year in the spring Julliard and NYU and Yale and hundreds of schools across the country graduate classes of trained actors, and in those classes are actors of color. So to say that there aren't enough actors of color is factually inaccurate.

You have to see through one's faults before you see their need.

Working on Shakespeare and learning about Shakespeare was the big takeaway for me.

The horror genre is fun but I'm not sure it is quite right for me.

The way people are responding to [Moonlight movie] is something we never anticipated. We knew it was good but it is so diverse. The way people are reacting shows me that everyone sees themselves in it. That is groundbreaking. Similarly people come up some older people that it is not their story but are just crying in our arms after a screening. They know what it was like to be bullied or struggled with their own identity trying to figure out who they are. It has really caught people's imaginations.