Winston Duke Quotes

I've always tried to fight against, 'Oh, who's that small funny actress? Let's get her.'

Show business always tries to stereotype you, so that is something you have to fight against no matter who you are. A lot of actors who are of a minority background complain that they only get stereotyped roles, and they are 100 percent correct. However, it's also true that, no matter who you are, you get typecast as well.

I'm a little concerned I'm always going to be playing a black guy, you know what I'm saying?

When I started, it was all meter maids or the sassy nurse, or the sassy receptionist in the hospital. And I felt like: Are those the only jobs that large, black women have?

Watching 'Girls,' it was really angering for me at first, because I really had spent decades hiding unlikable, unattractive Jewish girls in likable, attractive, non-Jewish actors and characters.

Is typecasting really a problem?

I know a lot of brown actors who play terrorists because they're physically intimidating. For me, it was like, 'O.K., you'll be the nerd.' So I've played the nerd. I've played food-delivery guys. But I always tried to find something in the characters so that they weren't just defined by what they looked like.

For the most part, the roles Asians can get aren't necessarily well-rounded, and more often than not, they're stereotypes. But that's all we have. And then we see each other all the time at auditions, because we're all going for the same role. I've made a lot of friends that way.

Being the house ethnic was destroying my life and my sense of myself, because I had been consigned to play every dusky maiden you have ever seen in your life in movies.

I am an African-American woman of dark skin tone, and there are very specific roles that are usually given to African-American women of a darker hue. Let's start with 'Once on This Island': peasant girl. Let's go to 'The Color Purple': young girl, beaten. Let's go to 'Ragtime': Her baby's taken.

I've been asked far too often, 'Can you be blacker?' I've gotten done with auditions and heard, 'We're not going to go black with this character.'

I think the media and the Internet and all that stuff, has created this perception of black women as these mammy types, kind of angry, you know, full of pent up emotions and resentments. And that these women are people to feared rather than loved.

Quite often in comic book movies, very good actresses are relegated to being the girlfriend or the helper or the sidekick or something.

When you see a movie, they always put the Latino on the bad side or in a tacky way. It's not like that. Latinos are shining like a diamond.

Our internal racism is still alive. We are still putting each other down and making jokes about each other because of the color of our skin. With women particularly, it's difficult because the beauty business says, 'If you don't look a certain way, God made a mistake.'

I'm guilty of reverse discrimination. I'm white, and people don't think that white fighters are any good.

I was teased a lot, growing up, because of my skin tone.

The ingrained image of black men being searched by the police feeds into the collective illusion that black men everywhere need to be policed more than others.

I was afraid that I'd be typecast as the token firang. That happened initially. Now, I am acting in 'Noises Off' and 'Menagerie,' where all of us are playing British and American characters. That makes me feel better.

I think about the history of racism in this country all the time.

I have to battle so many issues, and the biggest is racism.

Racism can be called our nation's own specific 'original sin.'

People always told me that nothing would match my face, my structure other than roles of sophisticated, educated women. I felt it was an insult to me.

The colour of someone's skin doesn't explain anything.

Typecasting is a thing, but when it involves race, it narrows the roles available to an almost comically small amount.