And this is what was fascinating to me about 'The Help'; they were ordinary people who did extraordinary things.

All you really need to do is shift people just a tiny bit for change to happen. It doesn't have to be huge and humongous.

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.

I look back at pictures of myself and I remember thinking, "I was so fat when I was growing up. I was 165 pounds when I graduated from high school. I was a mess".

Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that's inside of you.

People call me a theater actor, but I'm just an actor. But I tell my friends all the time - especially a lot that do theater and haven't done a lot of TV/film - that you have so much more control over your work onstage. When you go onstage, you can really see the difference between people who can really do it, and people who are just kind of pretending to do it. There is no editor, there's nothing that's going to stop the actor from showing what they can do unless it's not a well-written role.

On stage you never watch yourself. You just experience it, and then you go home, and you feel pretty good if you gave a pretty good performance or crappy if you didn't. But in TV and film, you actually have to experience it while you're doing it, and then you have to watch it. And then when you're watching it, you watch it with a different sensibility than how you experienced it.