When you have a play, you have to be on every night.

There is a lot of struggle in being an actor; you need so much emotional strength, no matter what level of stardom you have, that it's nice to have something steady.

I've never gotten any complaints about my headscarf from a man. You can be sexy with a head wrap!

The great thing about the stage is that you have a structured month-long rehearsal period where you're going in every day. You have to have lots of run-throughs with theater because there are no second takes in front of a live audience.

The inspiration for this movie [Something New] was this Newsweek article that came out a couple of years ago that talks about 42.4 percent of black women in America aren't married. Black women are shooting up the corporate ladder way faster than our black male counterparts. And (black men) are either dating outside their race, in jail or dying. And so if you want to have a family, you want to be married, you have to look at other options.

The Alien is gross, scary. There is something in a human being that looks at them and sees it as a cockroach. You can never feel nurturing towards the cockroach.

It was a good script [Something New]. We have not seen an interracial issue dealt with from a black woman and white man's perspective in this way. And, usually, it's a black man, white woman. I loved the fact that it wasn't about the couple being against the world or the couple against the family. I loved the fact that it was her dealing with her own prejudices that came up, her own guilt, her own shame and embarrassment about what her peers thought.