After I finished 'E.R.', I wanted to concentrate on re-examining what kind of actress I am and taking time for real-life things.

Regardless of how you feel about war and peace those serving military are doing a duty for the rest of us and they're protecting a way of life that they sometimes come back to and it's not close to them.

I like diversity; I want one character to be very different from the next. I love to live with a character for a long time if I can, but I like one character to be different from the next.

I think the hardest thing about the part is the responsibility that you feel playing something that is so real and resonant in our times. There are people coming home right now with those stories, and I'm just an actress pretending to be that person. You hope that you can shed some light on somebody's predicament.

I think when things happen in our lives that we can't truly understand why they destroy us, it's because we can't truly understand or communicate it to anyone else. And that is what is destructive - you can't communicate it to the people that you love and it makes things deteriorate. Or you're hiding from yourself, or you're hiding from somebody else, and that was really fascinating to me... that life isn't like the movies and you can't always point to one thing and explain why you did things that ended up hurting you.

I think some of the most important things we read about other people occurs from being able to read their faces and their eyes and their body and those kinds of things.

I always had something to think about or draw from, which as an actor is a gift. The beautiful thing about film is that it gets so much closer than stage. I love stage and that's what I started doing and it's a beautiful art form in of itself, but in film you can move your eyes to the side and somehow the audience can fill in the blanks of what you're thinking.