Retta Quotes

I'd be stupid not to take into consideration that there are certain things people will not consider me for because my name is Lopez. And I know I can do any kind of role. I don't want anybody to say, Oh, she can't pull this off. So those are barriers that you have to overcome.

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

Being the person I am, you know, the size I am, being a woman, being a black woman, there's not a lot of roles for us.

A lot of parts written for people of my size, dwarfs, are either foolish idiots or, like, these sages that are all-knowing, and they're very, sort of, come-to-them-for-answers.

But it is true that some magazines have a policy to show only a certain amount of black girls on their covers. Naomi is right. It's not fair, and I wish it would change.

Like one of any minority, I have experienced prejudice.

One of the things I have an allergic reaction to playing, especially as a black actor, is the mandatory kind of best friend/cop/detective type. You will never see me in that movie.

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.

People ask if I'm concerned about getting pigeonholed. No one asks, 'Ellen, you've done seven straight roles in a row. Shouldn't you shake it up, do something queer?' There's still that double standard.

The media's image of us is as animals, and we were never that to me. I knew love from black folks.

In television and the movie business, the people who are promoted and the people who are mentored always look like the white guys.

We all, white and black, carry various biases around with us.

No single race has a monopoly on racism.

People are making a lot more noise about representation and diversity. But I think modeling is one of the professions where people can be kind of racist.

It's almost comical how un-liberal liberal Hollywood is when it comes to fighting gender and racial bias.

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.

There aren't a lot of roles for sleepy-eyed black dudes.

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.

Casting directors will often say that they are open to any ethnicity, but they're not.

I've not been discriminated against, but I can see it happen. And not just race but gender and sexuality, too. It's stereotyping, lazy casting, which is an issue: that people can't see outside the box.

If you're looking for the safe choice, you shouldn't be supporting a black guy named Barack Obama to be the next leader of the free world.

There are expectations in how you play your character as a black woman, to be sassy and the same kind of feel, as if there are no quirky black women. I struggle with those things constantly, trying to add dimension to my work, and that's the goal, too.

The number of Latino roles is very limited, and it's unfortunate there isn't more color-blind casting.

I'm a natural blonde. But when I started acting, I would go to auditions and they didn't know where to put me because I was voluptuous and had the accent, but I had blonde hair. It was ignorance: they thought every Latin person looks like Salma Hayek.

One of the things about being a minority actor is that you don't have that opportunity as some of your counterparts to keep that flow, to constantly be going from one thing to the other, so when you see really great performances out there by some black folks, you know it's coming from somewhere deep, because they just don't work as much.