Joan Van Ark Quotes

It's been difficult to find roles that are independent, strong, and self-assured; I always say I can't play the princess. I'm not a pretty princess! I'm a tomboy.

There's something about Southern women that is so unique yet so universal. Strong southern women are allowed to be soft and feminine and have a sense of humor. But what I love about Southern women in particular is their universality.

'That's What She Said' is not Hollywood's standard picture of women: preternaturally gorgeous, wedding obsessed, boy crazy, fashion focused, sexed up 'girl' women. These are real women, comically portrayed, who are trying to wrestle with the very expectations of womanhood that Hollywood movies set up.

I've always been so uninterested in playing any kind of archetype of some pure, innocent, virginal woman. I just don't believe it.

I've played lots of strong women in film, in big Hollywood films, and I've sometimes had a hard time in coming to a consensus of what makes a woman strong. What is it that positions her as a force to be reckoned with? And I think it's because there's an expectation from the get-go that she isn't. If you're not starting from a deficit as a point of view, but you're starting from an assumption that says, "Well, this is what women really are," then it's a really freeing experience as an actor and as a woman.

I'm no Ripley. I had doubts that I could play her as strongly as she had to be played, but I must say that it was fun exploring that side of myself. Women don't get to do that very often.

I'd been so tired of 'strong female characters' for so long by then. I was so tired of the way female strength was made to look cold and humorless; the way it was characterized as deviant and 'unnatural' and always lonely and exceptional. I was tired of the grim undertone of tragedy that lurked under its surface. 'Strong female characters' were never funny, and they never had any fun, either. More often than not, they were celibate, friendless, and clinically depressed. Their monomaniacal devotion to crime fighting made them lean, cranky, and impatient. Naturally, they had axes to grind: they were avenging brides, poker-faced assassins, gloomy ninjas with commitment issues. Who were these characters? What were they trying to tell us? Why didn't they ever say goodbye before hanging up the phone? And why were they always being reborn or remade as killing machines after losing everything they held dear?

People ask me why I write strong women, and I say, 'Well, I don't like stupid ones.' Who would want to read about weak and whiny women? Are they people who assume women are weak and whiny? If so, why do they think that?

It's amazing that we have lead females on television and a couple of them over 40. Thank you very much. And being beautiful and strong and sexy and everything that you hope for.

There's an unfair position that women are sometimes put in, in the context of superhero movies and action movies, where at once they have to be very strong and fierce but also sexy.

My mom's mother was from Virginia, but I don't feel much of a tie. I'm very much anti-South for many, many reasons. Whenever I go down there, people are always looking at me funny, you know.

I try to do more intelligent roles, unusual roles, and stronger women, and that's helped me a little bit with my casting opportunities.

A big producer offered me the part of the pretty girl that waits at home for the guy, and I couldn't do it. That's not a story I ever want to tell.

Strong, smart, self-reliant women who don't need men to define them only crop up in the human myth-base in one guise - the Wicked Witch.

I'm a good girl, you know? But I'm from the South, and there are some powerful women down there, and very theatrical.

It's nice to get my teeth into something that isn't a stereotypical female role.

In the public eye, girls and women with strong perspectives are hated. If you're a girl with an opinion, people just hate you. There are still people who are afraid of successful women, and that's so lame.

Apparently, I hear from people I always play strong women. I don't see them that way.

I try to write from a place of writing what I know, and what I know is interesting and appropriate women with edgy senses of humor. They're not soft people, so why are all the movies about women soft? My friends are all blazing their own paths. Some are married with kids, but a lot of them aren't. Some of them don't want that life.

In 2013, I started playing Fara Sherazi on 'Homeland.' I love playing her, not just because she's a strong woman, but because for the first time, a Muslim woman is being portrayed on television as a regular person, rather than a cliche or collection of stereotypes.

As women, we're always supposed to be catty, or too cute to dance. And it sucks.

When I was growing up, I wanted to see girls like me on television and in movies - strong girls who aren't crying over their relationships or whatever.

I prefer to avoid the phrase 'strong women' when talking about female characters and the lack thereof or the need therefore, because it's not about being strong, it's also about being vulnerable, funny etc.

I was just a girl from Alabama.

As a female comic, if you talk about sex in any capacity, you will be branded a 'sex comic,' so I might as well go full force on it.