As an actor, I go where the good writing is. That's the bottom line.

Ismail Merchant was just the most seductive, passionate, outrageous, driven, genius of a man.

I think Cruella is evil, because she's the devil. But all the other characters, I was able to find a common humanity with them somewhere, knowing where they're most fragile, where they're most vulnerable, knowing some of the things that happened to them that might have formed this kind of behavior.

So you have the challenge of just learning the lines, period, and not only learning them, but learning them to the extent that you assimilate them, so that you're not worried about what the next word is coming out of your mouth when it comes to doing a scene. And you're also in the trenches with the writers, just in the wonderful kind of back and forth of how is it best to say something, even if it involves four or five words. I love that kind of thing.

I don't have the body or the face for romantic comedies, so I've never been offered those. The challenge is that a lot of people see you only as your last character, so you're constantly competing with whatever your last movie was.

The mentally ill frighten and embarrass us. And so we marginalize the people who most need our acceptance. What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, more unashamed conversation.

I think our family is like a lot of families. We had no vocabulary for mental illness