I met [ Samuel L. Jackson ] for the first time on The Today Show. He came out of an elevator. I was promoting A Mighty Wind and he was promoting something else. He said, "I hear we're going to be working together." I said, "On what?" He said, 'The Man.' I hadn't heard his name mentioned before. I made a few calls and found out he had the script and was interested. That was it.

I approach my work the way an actor approaches their work. The only difference is that I do comedy, and my job is to make things funny. My style makes things sound like they're improvisational and happening right then and there.

If you have an opportunity to use your voice you should use it.

Girl, don't make me put my foot in your ass.

What I remember from [the first meeting with Samuel L. Jackson] was that he was a friendly, animated kind of guy. His screen image is a hard boiled intimidating kind of character. That's what I remembered thinking, 'Boy, this guy seems like a normal guy.'

I'm actually very ordinary, except people get to pay their money to come watch me work. The same way that we go to McDonald's.. we don't care about the guy behind the counter, but if he was doing something special, we'd pay our money to go watch him cook that hamburger.

Everything that I've gone through informs me and my opinions in a way, I guess because I am a child of segregation. I lived through it. I lived in it. I was of it.