Christopher Priest Quotes

I'm very happy to have the heritage that I do, but I'm not wanting to be 'the Latino actor.' I just want to be 'an actor.'

Wherever I go, people ask: 'What is she? What is she?' There has always been an agenda - they're excluding me or including me in something with that question. It is the first thing agents in Los Angeles ask me. And then I'd hear: 'You're not black enough, you're too black, you're Italian - no, you're Spanish.'

Not only do I not want to be stereotyped as this Asian girl who fights - gee, what a wonder - but also I have more to offer than that.

I think it was hard for people to cast me as an ethnic, as an Asian American woman.

I don't want to shut the door and only be thought of as the dark girl.

I'm not the Asian kid of 'Riverdale;' I'm Reggie, and I just happen to be Chinese.

Being the person I am, you know, the size I am, being a woman, being a black woman, there's not a lot of roles for us.

And I used to say, 'I'm black, too.' In other words, I - my whole life I've been called a half-breed, a convict, king of the trailer trash, this and that. I take that and stand.

When I first started, all the media I ever got was, 'Hey! There's this Indian girl. And even though she is Indian, she gets views and stuff.'

I used to go to some Harvard parties with my athlete friends, and they would introduce me as 'Winona, the Indian activist.' It made me uncomfortable. I felt like a novelty.

The funny thing is I'm not even Latin. I was constantly getting Latin roles, and I was like, I even was nominated for an award, and I was like, 'Let them know at the NAACP, the first white woman. Let them know I'm totally grateful, but I'm not Latin. I can't do that. I play Latin.'

At some point we have to stop and say, There's Marlee, not, There's the deaf actress.

I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians.

I never consider myself a minority. I see people who look like me in Barbados, in Trinidad, in Haiti, in London, and in Brooklyn. So I don't know what the heck anyone means when they call me a 'minority.' There's something about that word to me. It just minimalizes people.

I know a lot of brown actors who play terrorists because they're physically intimidating. For me, it was like, 'O.K., you'll be the nerd.' So I've played the nerd. I've played food-delivery guys. But I always tried to find something in the characters so that they weren't just defined by what they looked like.

What I've run into more than anything is people who have a belief that they know who you are. Type-casting happens because people actually write you off. 'You are in this box. That's all you are; that's everything you are.' It's a very de-humanizing experience.

I wasn't, like, pretty enough to be the ingenue; I wasn't 'character' enough to be the goofball sidekick. I'm kind of ethnically ambiguous.

I am African-American, and I am a proud African-American. I just don't like to put myself in a box and say, 'I'm an African-American actress.' I am an American actress, and I can do any kind of role.

I believe that a lot of minority writers stress about whether they get pigeonholed in writing about identity stuff, like you can't write about other things.

I had a niche. And my niche was that I was brown. So it's like, 'Great, I get to go up for all these 'brown parts.'' I call them 'brown parts' because that's what they are. That's not to be resentful, because I loved playing those parts - I got to meet so many cool actors.

Everyone always says, 'We don't want to be pigeonholed.' But sometimes, your pigeonhole is a great place to be.

I can't compete for roles that require me to be Caucasian or African American, even if those characters really connect with me and intrigue me.

No matter how cutting-edge Hollywood may seem, it is still delayed in how it views people: If producers do not perceive me as an Iranian girl, then I cannot play an Iranian girl. If you aren't perceived as a full black girl, then it makes it more difficult to play a black girl on TV.

Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say "Oh, she's so angry." If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes "Oh, she's autobiographical."

I do definitely get boxed into this #BlackGirlMagic social activist category. But it makes me think, "Well, maybe people are able to start thinking about that concept earlier and will hopefully be inspired to delve deeper into it and research it more." I think that's just how the media works. It's just very good at compartmentalizing human beings.