Tracee Ellis Ross Quotes

I would rather be loved by somebody who respected me.

Every actor turns everything round to their character.

In marriage, there's a lot of ignoring each other, which is hard to fake on-screen.

As an actor, you use the things from yourself that you can apply to the character.

You couple that with how I looked when I was younger, and growing up... The voice is not quite breaking. It's awful. No, I don't enjoy that at all. But that's one of the things people love and find so endearing about the Harry Potter series, and why they've lasted so long. Because people have grown up with us, and they care about the characters. They're not just some characters in the film, they're people you can relate to, and you care about, and you grew up with, and when they die in this film, people feel it!

The only time that most women give their orating husbands undivided attention is when the old boys mumble in their sleep.

My husband is so useless that it's hard for me to be romantic with him. I get down on the floor and say, If you love me, blink your eyes.

I always tell my husband, 'That's it, I quit, I've done all I wanted,' and he's just like, 'Yeah, yeah. Sure.'

I've played characters who are dark and have done things I never have experienced, which is why I try to find the reasons why they do what they do. We're all people, and go through similar emotions.

In general, in the matters that relate to theology or behavior, people to one another, Paul was obviously biblically correct. But when he said that women should always cover their hair or that women should not teach men, women should not have leadership positions in the church, women should not speak in the church, I don't' think that those writings of Paul can be extracted by themselves to stand alone. Also, Paul said that women should be subservient to their husbands but if you read a couple of verses down it says husbands should treat their wives as equals.

Sometimes when a character in a novel is difficult for me to enter, I sue something in myself or in my own life as a doorway into that character's mind and emotions.

This is a couple that actually loves, respects & appreciates each other.

The first thing, the main thing, about how I work is I need to understand the character.

It kind of varies. I don’t have a method yet. It depends on the script and the character I think I need. I’ve worked with acting coaches, researched roles, and channeled different parts of myself. It’s on a case-by-case for me, right now.

You don't need to like any of the characters, as long as you can understand why and where they're from. Why do you need to like any of the characters in the movie? That's not how life is. You don't like everyone that you meet.

Because as an actor, I really feel you cannot judge a character. You have to totally commit to that character. And for me to totally commit to the character, I have to find those places where I understand the sequence of behavior.

People talked about being a parent, or being a mother or a father. We don't talk about "wiving" our husbands or "friending" our friends, or "childing" our parents. We just talk about being in a relationship with those people. You don't measure whether your marriage was good based on whether or not your husband is better now than he was 10 years ago, or whether your friend is richer than when they first became your friend. The relationships between parents and children is a kind of love, rather than a kind of work.

I look back at my career when I was younger and can connect what I was going through at the time with the characters I was playing. I see the similarities in them reflecting on my life.

The parent reads the book. The kid reads the book and then they can talk about the characters instead of talking about themselves. You know there's a connection even if you don't talk about it when you read the same books.

If you never fall in love with your character, you'll never be able to do that character justice. No matter who it is, no matter what the character does, you have to find the reason for it. Everyone's got a reason for what they do, even if it's a reason that they're not proud of.

Any husband who says, "My wife and I are completely equal partners," is talking about either a law firm or a hand of bridge.

On the surface, Wonder Boys seemed like such a departure from L.A. Confidential - it's funny, it's contemporary, and so on - and yet at a certain point, I had a feeling that reminded me how I felt when I was shooting L.A. Confidential. I analyzed it for a while, and thought about how emotionally involved I was with the characters. Then I realized that in both movies, there are three main male characters and one female, and all of them are struggling to figure out what they're doing with their lives, independent of each other.

It's funny, people talk about the characters they play and who do you sort of see yourself as or which ones maybe were closest to you and in some ways.

It's interesting to talk to my mom about her character in Wild at heart, because she sees her as a mother who's just trying to protect her baby from a bad boy. I think that's why it works so beautifully - she has conviction about what she's doing.

It's definitely a difficult thing to capture and I mean, I've seen a ton of movies where I've believed the couple and I've seen a ton of movies where I have not believed them at all. Unfortunately, as an audience member, you check out if you don't believe them.