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.

I think watching my mom gave me great inspiration, I wish that had been reinforced more verbally. It would have kept me from a lot of pain.

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.

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

I get so excited when my daughter says something new, which she is doing every day. I can leave the house for a few hours, come back and meet a totally different person. That's very exciting to me.

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.

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