Brianna Wu Quotes

I thought, 'Oh, this is great,' because maybe someone who does look like me will watch 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.' and realize that they can be an actor if they want to be, or they can be a superhero. They can have a hero that looks like them as well.

I didn't see a lot of women who looked like me on TV when I was growing up.

When I grew up, I never saw anyone looking like me on TV, you know? I'm so glad to see a lot more of us on television, whether it's Mindy Kaling or it's Irrfan Khan or Freida Pinto. You know, I hope, like, little girls across the world can just look at me and say, 'Ah, I want to be that!' Indian or not, it shouldn't matter.

I'm really passionate about representation in film. I feel like the world is dominated by such a small group of human beings. There are so many different kinds of people that aren't represented, that don't have characters who look like them.

I just didn't see anyone on TV who looked like me, and then I saw George Takei being cool and piloting the spaceship on television.

I never thought acting would be a realistic job for me. Because, quite frankly, I didn't see people who looked like me doing it. I quickly realized, that's all the more reason to try.

I had no role models from my own community - there was no such thing. Earlier on, there were people like Dolores Del Rio, but I was too young for that - that was before me. There was really nobody out there.

I started writing stories at a young age, but not once did it occur to me that I could grow up to be a writer. Who could I look to? My favorite authors were Ann M. Martin and E.L. Konigsburg and Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary and Lois Lowry and Norma Klein. They were all white women, and they seemed so stately to me, so elegant. A whole world away.

I didn't grow up with a lot of role models necessarily when I started out - there weren't many people who looked like me on TV. Not in England.

I didn't have a hero playing in sports that looked like me.

It's hard to be what you can't see.

There's room for everyone, and everyone is wanted and needed. Whoopi showed me that. When I first saw 'The Color Purple,' it was so huge. That was the first time I had seen myself, my mother, my aunts, women that I had known my whole life on-screen. It gives us hope, and it gives us confidence.

I didn't see a lot of role models or women who looked like me on screen when I was growing up. For me, one thing that changed all of that was seeing Keke Palmer in 'Akeelah and The Bee.' That film made me realize that I wasn't an alien.

If you can't see it, you can't be it.

It's important for kids to see someone who looks like them carving his own path. I definitely acknowledge that, and I think it's super great.

I grew up never seeing myself on-screen, and it's really important to me to give people who look like me a chance to see themselves. I want to see myself as the hero of any story. I want to see myself save the world from the bomb.

I'm not into the Oscar and Emmys as much as I used to be because I'm tired of looking at people who don't look like me.

As a kid I didn't see black cowboys on the screen. What that said to me was that there were things I couldn't do or be because of my color. What we see others like us do gives us permission to expand our own horizons.

You can't be what you don't see. I didn't think about being a doctor. I didn't even think about being a clerk in a store, I'd never seen a black clerk in a clothing store.

I remember when the wave of Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayek and these beautiful Hispanic women came into light, and I looked up to them and I loved them, but I was like, 'Where are Middle Eastern women?'

Role models really matter. It's hard to imagine yourself as something you don't see.

There's a burden of representation that comes into play when there aren't enough representatives of a certain group in popular culture.

If you're going to be a Black engineer, you've got to see a Black engineer.

I grew up watching cinema in my country that wasn't telling stories about us, and we had to find a way to connect, and our references, our role models had nothing to do with us. And I'm so glad that it's changing.

Latino people have come up to me and said they were motivated to become a lawyer because they saw me play one on TV - and you can't discount how great it is when they tell me I was the first.