For me, that was a hard scene [in "Fences"] to do twenty-something times, which (laughing), I counted. That was difficult, but once I did it, I felt like I could do anything.

And I sit in my jacuzzi with my script.

Any actor will tell you, as soon as your ego and your vanity come into the mix, it destroys your work. Completely destroys it.

You absolutely feel, as a black actress, that you've got to ride the wave because there's just so few roles. I hate to play that card, but it's the truth. There's not a lot of roles.

There's not one woman in America who does not care about her hair, but we give it way too much value. We deprive ourselves of things, we use it to destroy each other, we'll look at a child and judge a mother and her sense of motherhood by the way the child's hair looks. I am not going to traumatize my child about her hair. I want her to love her hair.

I think that you always want to gravitate towards people who absolutely are great at what they do and go for authenticity.

If you're a boxer, you want to get the ring with a Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali type. When you're acting, you want to get in with Meryl Streep, and that's what I did.