Marisa Tomei

I’ve just been really lucky to not be too much of a stereotype.

I was exposed to the arts, but there was no one in my family who was an artist.

You express different energies at different times in your life.

I don’t prefer much of film over stage. The only thing I prefer is the paycheck.

You have your structure, but within it, it gets fuller and you can highlight other parts of the performance.

Politics itself is so unsexy, isn’t it? But when the politics in creative works are really explored – not used as a vehicle – the results can be really interesting.

I am really not of the school of naturalism. I like style, and you can use more style in theater than in film roles. I love to sink my teeth into a part.

All of us have read the stories about young people in Hollywood and all the challenges they have to confront there, and I think that artistically, I really didn’t understand the commercial side of the film business, so I went back to a purely artistic setting.

With acting, it was really more of a general kind of experience of really just loving being in the theater.

I really don’t like when things are all polished and perfect – the perfect love story and the hair is perfect.

A man like Wilde was not free to live out of the closet as a homosexual, and women in general were not able to be truly themselves; there was no place for a woman’s voice to be heard or for her to express her sexuality.

Not to get overly psychological about this, but it’s probably why I became an actress in the first place: for that kind of freedom and refuge, as well as for the fact that I just love acting so much.

I grew up on musicals, and I know they are quite the thing now, but I’m actually a little indignant, because I started taking singing lessons years ago – I put the time in!