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.

I don't have a Facebook or a Twitter account, and I don't know how I feel about this idea of, "Now, I'm eating dinner, and I want everyone to know that I'm having dinner at this time." or "I just mailed a letter and dropped off my kids." That, to me, is a very strange phenomenon.

I don't feel the need to brand myself in that way [social media]. But as a means to share information and raise awareness of things, I think these social-networking platforms are unprecedented.

I never struggled with trying to figure out what it was I wanted to do or what made the sparks go for me.

I'm good with dialect. Some actors do it immediately; other actors never quite get it. It's something I've always really enjoyed and something I've always been pretty fast with.

I don't want to be the ingenue anymore. It's nice to be glamorous, but I don't want to always be an object of desire. Because it doesn't last.

We are supposed to be liberated in America but if our President [George W. Bush] had his way, we wouldn't be educated about sex at all. Every woman would have six children and we wouldn't be able to have abortions.