Work hard and figure out how to be useful and don't try to imitate anybody else's success. Figure out how to do it for yourself with yourself.

I don't think nostalgia is very useful to me. There is a story to be told, there's behaviour to create or to bring to the screen that will help tell that story, and nostalgia is just not really a big part of my emotional package.

The only ambition I ever had going into and committing to wanting to be an actor was to live my life.

I have the ordinary experience of having the blender bottom come off in my room upstairs. I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I'm in an airplane talking to air-traffic control, and they don't know who they're talking to. I have a lot of common experiences. What's important is to be able to see yourself, as having commonality with other people and not determine, because of your good luck, that everybody is less significant, less interesting, less important than you are.

I wanted to live the life, a different life. I didn't want to go to the same place every day and see the same people and do the same job. I wanted interesting challenges.

[ Chadwick Boseman] was not a baseball player. He spent, I don't know, countless hours, many months, working two sessions a day with professional pro coaches to develop the baseball skills that he needed.

I came across the script [42], and I read it, and I said, "I really want to do this." And when I had my agent call, they said, ah, you know, it's not what they're looking for. So, OK. And then I let it go for a while, and then it just kept gnawing at me, so I kept pushing.