It's important for people to figure out their own lives before involving someone else - to gauge where you are and work on your own issues.

Having visited Oxfam-funded school programs in rural communities has made me realise how vital education is to developing countries in bringing people out of poverty and giving them a sense of dignity, self-worth and confidence.

I like taking parts where I'm like: "I don't know how I'm going to do this exactly but I know I can do it." As opposed to doing something where you go: "There's nothing that I can contribute to this."

I love musicals, I started acting because I wanted to be in a musical.

My parents never put a lot of pressure on us to be any kind of way.... I have my funny moments where I look at myself and think, Oh, this is a disaster. But you have to give yourself a reality check and go, All right, if I feel this way, I'm going to do something about it that's healthy. I can't look at somebody who is 6 feet tall and 120 pounds and say, I'm going to get that body. That's just never going to happen. You have to work with what you've got.

I campaigned for [Barack] Obama for more than a year. I was in Iowa, Minnesota, California, Arizona - just traveling around to help get the word out. It was such a huge, spirited campaign, and so positive. But you travel around to cities in the U.S. now and there's just this hopelessness that has set in. It makes it hard to understand why it seems so impossible to make any kind of progressive change with an administration that is seemingly progressive, or why we keep encountering such political roadblocks to change.

You think that your life is going to be one way, and then, for various reasons or whatever, it doesn't work out.