I was recently watching Rihanna on the Billboard awards, and I was like, My God, she's incredible! And then I looked up her age [28]. She's always been talented. She's always been a star. But when you see her, she's becoming herself. It's age that happens. That's what I respond to.

I sometimes think to myself, you're not going to meet a new friend of any kind at home in front of the TV with your DVR. As much as it's great, and there are so many good shows on TV, and I have great books that I'm reading, get out and interact with people.

And it [acting] was exciting to me. And scary.

Here is my wish and my desire and my pledge as well: that we remember our true nature and our womanhood. That we own and know that we are more than our bodies and yet our bodies are these sacred, beautiful, rhythmic houses for us.

I felt like it was a courageous show [Black-ish] from the beginning. We are a black family - we're not a family that happens to be black. But the show is not even about us being black. The show is about us being a family. That is groundbreaking - on TV, the black characters either happen to be black or they're the "black character," where everything they say is about being black. I think that's the genius.

Throughout high school, I was obsessed with magazines. I used to just comb through them and plaster things on my wall.

We all, as women, need to continue to change our gaze from how we are seen to how we are seeing.