Phyllida Lloyd Quotes

An actress can only play a woman. I'm an actor, I can play anything.

I have often been asked why I am so fond of playing male parts. As a matter of fact, it is not male parts, but male brains that I prefer.

The thing about women playing boys is that we're not going to age, and we're not going to go through puberty in the middle of a long-running series.

I've given up trying to convince the world about the authenticity of my femininity.

When women play men, it brings out our better game.

If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.

We all have a cross-gender character: Every woman has a man that they can play, and every man has a woman that they can play.

I felt alien my whole life, but I didn't feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.

Being in drag for three months - I now have an idea of what women go through. At least maybe a little.

When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.

No one knows 'men' as such, any more than anyone knows 'women,' and if they do generalise they're probably trying to hide their own ignorance. You might know one 'man,' yes, or even lots of individual 'men'.

I think we're struggling with trying to redefine various positions at this point in history. To allow freedom for women, freedom for men, freedom from those sharply defined gender roles.

Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.

I know how it feels to be a woman because I am a woman. And I won't be classified as just a man.

We talked about Tootsie, the idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman.

There is more difference within the sexes than between them.

As societies continue to loosen their standards regarding what is appropriate female and male behavior, I think we are going to realize we have not only underestimated women, but also men.

Normally, an actress has to work to bring out her male side. In our case, the dynamic is reversed. The actor playing her modelled himself on Sharon Stone.

Hedi was and is still misspelled 'Heidi,' and my perception of genders ended up slightly out of focus from an early age.

I am tired of women playing action heroes like men, because they are not men. But sometimes they are written like men.

We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it's a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.

Girls can wear jeans, cut their hair short, wear shirts and boots, 'cause it's okay to be a boy, but for a boy to look like a girl is degrading.

Well I do think, when there are more women, that the tone of the conversation changes, and also the goals of the conversation change. But it doesn't mean that the whole world would be a lot better if it were totally run by women. If you think that, you've forgotten high school.

As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag.

Then I wanted the character to be feminine as opposed to effeminate. Because it's easy to be camp or queen. Anyone can do that. What's difficult is to play feminine.