It's Aslan, the lion from The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. It's a symbol of my hellish childhood. I struggled through my oppressive teenage years and when I turned 18 I escaped. Like Aslan I was finally free.

I think I'm better at playing difficult than I am at being normal. And to me that's something I'm working on now. I'm not really that difficult or complex a person, so it's interesting to me that it's just so much harder for me to play an everygirl.

When I was a little girl - well, like, a teenager - I wanted to be Sam Jackson. I always wanted to be men.

I think it's really great to be able to stick with a character for a long period of time. It's not like you have one shot, and that's it.

The more that I can work in different mediums, the more I can grow, and learn from different actors and different types of actors and directors and different styles of acting and build a tool box.

Remember who you are. It's really okay to be who you are.

I've done and said a lot of things when I was younger that I don't know if I even understood what I was doing or why I was doing it. There's a lot of compassion in understanding what people go through and even in trying to understand why a person would act the way they do. I was a very reactive person, and I did things that were just really bizarre; I don't think people understood it at all.