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.

Sometimes you take a job for the money, sometimes you take it for the location, sometimes you take it for the script; there are just a number of reasons, and ultimately what you see is the whole landscape of it. But I can tell you from behind the scenes - that's what it is, as an actor.

They say, 'To serve is to love,' and I think to serve is to heal, too.

Do not live someone else's life and someone else's idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that's inside of you.

When you shoot a scene, you remember every moment. You remember when your head went down, your head went up. You don't see little quirks, little eye movements, little lip movements. Once again, you become completely vain when you're watching it in a way that you weren't when you were shooting it. And the vanity, what it makes you focus on are everything that has nothing to do with the scene and everything to do with your own ego.

Each character has their own challenges. The challenge to doing one scene is your whole history of who you are and your relationships, you only have this one shot.

I already optioned a book called The Personal History of Rachel DuPree. I also like The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. And I love all of Octavia Butler's books. She's created some very complicated black heroines with a variety of belief systems. There are many great books out there, but those are a few of the ones that stand out.