Ian Anthony Dale Quotes

Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it's grotesque that the entertainment industry, for all its vaunted liberalism, is lagging so far behind social changes in the United States. And why has there never been an all-black daytime network soap? It would probably blow the white soaps off the map.

I'd love to be in a period drama - that's my obsession. But being a mixed-race actress, there aren't so many roles you're right for.

Even in today's opera world, the position of the black tenor is problematic.

All the networks have always been willing to have ethnic people as the third or fourth lead or the best friend to the white person. But to actually let a black family or an Asian family carry a show, that's something where there hasn't really been a precedent set in terms of a real financial gain.

When I was a little girl, there was no Variety Latino. When I was a little girl, there was no nothing. There were very few roles for people like myself.

Until recently, Hollywood offered only a handful of roles to actors of color. The majority of my opportunities have fallen into two categories: Scary Black and Funny Black.

When I was a kid, it wasn't very often that I could go to the movies and see an entire movie carried on the shoulders of someone who looked like me.

It's difficult because usually when they cast things, the main characters are Caucasian in absolutely almost every situation.

There has been a big debate about it: can a black man play a Nordic character?

'Black film,' that term allows studios to just marginalize a movie and say, 'We've made our black film. We've made our film with people of color in it,' as opposed to, 'I just feel like people of color should be in every genre.'

It takes time for brown people and people of different ethnicities to get into the Hollywood world, which is predominantly Caucasian and African American.

When you go back to 'Friends,' and you look at that as New York, there's no black people. That's not real. You're in New York City, and there's no black people at all. That's a little funny.

Once there are more African Americans and Asian Americans behind the scenes as producers, writers, and directors, I think more inclusive casting will happen.

Not only our political system is broken, but how we do business and have public discourse with one another. The system in Hollywood, specifically, is not depicting people of color; we're not even talking about Asian Americans or Latino Americans; we're not even getting into that question.

There's not enough black films out there. There's not enough Latin films, or films that have an Asian, Indian or Middle Eastern lead. The list goes on and on.

I think it's time that we had a dad of Middle Eastern descent on TV. The time is ripe for the Middle Eastern 'Cosby Show.' Or, as I like to call it, 'The Mazby Show.'

Growing up biracial, I didn't have someone to look up to watching TV or movies. Halle Berry was the closest one who looked like me. I'm happy to see more biracial people on screen, and I'm happy to represent for the little girls who didn't have someone who looked like me on TV.

You want to be able to really tackle a character and make it a fully-dimensional human being who is complicated, funny, and all the things that a person could be. If you can achieve that, you feel great. You so rarely get to do that as an actress in general, but as a black actress, it's almost never.

Alex, who I play on 'Quantico' - that part wasn't written for an Indian girl. So they changed her background to make her half Indian and half Caucasian.

When I was in school, you never saw anyone who looked like us that was on TV. And that was really weird for me because there's so many people of South Asian descent in America - in the world.

When I was growing up, all these superheroes were white. On some level, you put that out of your mind... but as you get older, you realize it's a very one-sided affair. So I'm very glad to see that these movies are becoming more diversified.

The lamest excuse that I get incessantly is, 'Oh, we're not going ethnic with that role,' so I can't go in for it, or I can't get the part, which is really stupid, because, in today's world, people look different.

I want authenticity. And rarely do actors - more specifically, black actors - get a chance to be authentic on film and television.

The way Hollywood and TV is, black people don't have any choice but to see ourselves in white-dominated television shows and stories and movies.

It's very rare that Black actors get an opportunity to do period pieces and to have a breadth of characters to choose from in their work.