Jurnee Smollett Quotes

There aren't good roles for women: the female parts aren't developed: the women are serving the men.

Male playwrights, on the whole, are probably more interested in male characters. They need women characters to be the women in their lives or to be the domestic difficulty.

I think male roles are generally much better written. So for actresses, we're always dealing with trying to inject a role with more truth than the writer possibly had in mind.

I think that's important to women in comedy, that we get a lot of the good lines and you're not just the girlfriend or the sister.

So many times, you get sent scripts where it's, like, the token chick, where the woman is just there to serve the man in the film.

Part of the problem is that many directors treat female characters too often as precious. Or they want to live in a fantasy world where they just do spinning hook kicks and knock out guys who are six foot four, and that doesn't work either.

I get the feeling that characters are written female when they have to be, and all the other characters are male, and it doesn't occur to somebody that the lawyer, the best friend, the landlord, whoever, can be female.

I find it extraordinary that contemporary dramatists don't find women interesting. Women are rarely, if ever, the central dramatic engine; they're there as an adjunct, and that hasn't changed at all.

Women are half the population of the world, and yet there are so few female characters on-screen.

Roles for women need to be better written.

I was frustrated in general with the way women are always portrayed. And it's always through a man's eyes.

Most people aren't familiar enough with what actually goes on in professional wrestling to know just how badly women are treated in WWE narratives.

We don't have enough young, female antiheroes. We don't accept women as antiheroes the way we do the men.

I'm drawn to female characters; not all of them are strong characters.

Most executives are male, so it's always sort of their vision of stuff. I'm constantly fighting against that even when I play the wife or the girlfriend or the best friend. I always try my hardest to bring as much layering in and not make things stereotypical, but it's hard.

There is this idea that you have to play heroines or women who succeed.

Thrillers have been traditionally very masculine books; the women characters often rather decorative.

Women exist in my imagination. So they are necessarily a type of abstraction. Many women criticise me for this vision, but I explain to them it's to be expected, because I am a man.

You know what? At the end of the day, funny is funny. I hope to see the end of all the female cliches that are written in a lot of comedies that are named chick flicks.

'True Detective' would not pass The Bechdel Test.

We should be writing more great roles for women, period. Another problem is that movies are generally made for 14-year-old boys, and 14-year-old boys want to watch 25-year-old action heroes.

I don't think there's any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult.

There have been a few times when I've read a script and it's really cool but the girl character's just kind of pathetic. It's not going to do me any favours just being 'the girl' in a cool movie.

Film is not a woman's medium. If you weren't the hottest kid in town, men stayed away from you.

It is odd there are many movies with many men. But generally movies have one woman, or maybe the older woman and the younger girl.