You're always looking for roles and other creatives who are going to be challenging to you, because you're always a better actor after the experience.

In what I do for a living, trust and confidence are key. Inevitably, you can't make brave choices and do your best work, if you don't have those, because it's such a subjective art form, and you don't have eyes on yourself.

I would make the tea on a Daniel Day-Lewis set just to observe how he crafts roles like he did in 'My Left Foot.' That was the equivalent of seeing Haley's Comet for me. I just couldn't understand how that was possible.

Excellence is the best weapon against prejudice.

I think that having a black president in this country has been a seismic shift, in terms of what has been going on racially in America. I think that America is now engaging with how we have come to this point.

I turned down a lot of easier opportunities in order to go for the things that I really and ultimately wanted to do. And what's really nice is that it's starting to work. I've been an actor for coming up on 14 years now and the level of activity that's taking place now is a culmination of a slow cooker approach to as opposed to a microwave.

The thing that would probably surprise most people was that Dr. Martin Luther King was a very reluctant leader. He felt very shocked at times that he had been chosen for this path, but he also understood that he was chosen for this path. He had several moments of acute doubt as to if he was up for the task - when people were injured in the protests he took it very personally, let alone when they were killed.