Karla Souza Quotes

They just think I'm a white dude. Every once in a while someone thinks I'm Jewish. I get a lot of stuff, but never Latino.

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.'

Coming in and out of Hollywood for pilot season, I may have to thicken my accent or hear that, physically, I'm not Latino. I not only am, but there's another 50,000 people who look exactly like me.

I haven't gotten labeled as a Hispanic actor.

It's funny - when I started acting, I didn't know I was going to be talking about Asian-American issues so much. You know what, though? It just comes with the territory, being ethnic.

I played a Spaniard. I looked about as Spanish as any other fair-skinned German.

I have played Polynesian. I have played an Arabian girl. I played an East Indian girl. And what was so confusing about that, which I mention in my book, is that I assumed I had to have an accent. Nobody said anything, so I made up what I call the universal ethnic accent, and they all sounded alike. It didn't matter who I was playing.

I'm just trying to play against ethnicity. I got to play a guy from Louisiana in 'The Pacific' named Merriell Shelton, and now I'm playing Elliot Alderman.

The only thing that said 'Lando Calrissian' was ethnic was his looks.

All the Asian people respect me and watch me. But I don't want people to think of me as an Asian player. I am just a football player.

Most of us, when imagining an All-American, wouldn't picture a man who looked like me. Not even I would.

With the first novel, I was concerned I would be pigeon-holed as an Asian-American writer, and the book would be labeled for Asian-Americans only.

People want to call me racist for doing the Bon Qui Qui character, and I'm like, 'Look, Bon Qui Qui is a representation of a hood chick. That's it.' There are lots of hood chicks out there: some are black, some are Mexican, some are Salvadorian, and some are white.

Obama is the closest thing to a Latino that we have. Barack. Everybody wants to see his birth certificate too.

There's a fashion, or maybe you could call it a necessity, in French cinema to make social films, which is to say films in which the characters are defined by their social context.

When you graduate is when you start to find yourself looking at the information in the audition breakdown and it says tall black African - or African-American built such and such. And you start seeing these character descriptions and seeing that, oh, you're only going in for the ones that are described as your look.

I don't think male characters are as one-dimensional as female characters.

There is a problem in America. An Irish or Polish American can write a story and it's an American story. When a Black American writes a story, it's called a Black story. I take exception to that. Every artist has articulated to his own experience. The problem is that some people do not see Blacks as Americans.

When I was perceived as a black man I became a threat to public safety. When I was dressed as myself, it was my safety that was threatened.

My Latin roots are very strong. All my life, because I'm blonde and blue-eyed, people who aren't Hispanic can't believe I am. And people who are Hispanic always think I'm not, because I don't look like them. Being Latin is part of who I am and I bring that part to every role.

You definitely care about your character because you wear it and you're associated to it by all means and I love the change and spontaneity. At the same time, you know, acting is a profession and you realize that this character is not necessarily your property.

I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals. Liberals are shockingly quick to demean and dismiss brilliant black people like Rice, Carson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Professor Walter E. Williams and economist Thomas Sowell because they don't fit into the role they have carved out for a black person in America. Black Americans must be obedient liberals on all things or risk being called a race traitor or an Uncle Tom.

You could easily play the guy as straight-up hood throughout the whole movie, the Imperial Courts, but writer and director Malik Vitthal envisioned a human being that has never been seen before in film: a black man in circumstances that he does not like, who is passionate - persistent - in turning it around.

What draws me to roles, I think, are moments - moments that define character, where so much more of the story is told in just a moment - a look, a line, a short scene, but something that speaks a volume, something that speaks to me.

I think men spend so much time passing for being men. There's a sense among many writers of color that the most invisible figure that was sitting between all of us was the nerd. But it was the thing we weren't saying, that people were afraid to say, like, "Yo, what we do is nerdy by definition."