I was a weird tomboy most of my life. I didn't see the power in my own female form for quite a long time. Maybe that's a good thing.

It's too scary in television. It's scary to sign a six-year contract for something that you don't necessarily know about.

Don't peak in high school.

If I was on Game of Thrones, I think the nudity and sex questions would probably get irritating, but this is a show about sex.

I wanted to see myself as something different, and I wanted to convince people that I was capable of something other than what they would expect from me.

It's a different thing with cable TV. You don't have to have your characters be lovely again by the end of the episode. And in this era of the male antiheroes on cable TV, you don't even need to make them likable; you just need to make them compelling. As opposed to film, where it's still those basic tropes of good versus evil. But for women, I don't think that has been widely seen yet.

On True Blood — I've never told anybody this—but I was so nervous and I was so drunk that after I shot the scene I was going up to the crew members — and I had just met all these people the day before — and I was going up to all of them like, 'You got a boner! You do! You've got one!' It was horrible. Horrible!