Holly Hunter Quotes

It'd be very difficult to cast me as a ballet dancer. Everybody is, in some sense, controlled by their size and their gender. I'm not going to be allowed to play the part that Denzel Washington plays.

At first I was always cast as the girlfriend. It was a long time before I got to play characters who were people.

My agent had told me that he was going to make me the Janet Gaynor of England—I was going to play all the sweet roles. Whereupon, at the tender age of thirteen, I set upon the path of playing nothing but hookers.

I'd like to play passionate women, but no one will let me.

I also have a film coming up called Breaking Up, and my part in that was not written for a Latina, and my character is not particularly pretty or sexy or exotic.

I never get the tall, blonde, glamorous roles because I'm not tall, blonde and glamorous. I'm more the wee, disturbing characters because of the way I look or sound.

People figure because I'm blonde and was a model, I just waltzed into Los Angeles and got major roles in major films.

We don't want to be our own niche. We're filmmakers like everybody. How many years in a row are we going to talk about the fact that we make films and we are women? Enough already.

I don't want to play the fat guy or the friend for the rest of my life.

I go into every film not just wanting to play the hot girl in the movie. It kills me.

The studios always had their idea of what I was, and they'd give me the dumb-blonde roles.

I think that what made people accept Starbuck as a woman was that she was just such an interesting character. I think that once people put their guard down and their preconceived notions of what the show is supposed to be and just allowed it to really be good science fiction.

I have a problem with the term 'leading man.' It's so limiting; it involves not upsetting anyone. Obviously, we have anti-heroes now, but if we're talking about the two tropes - character actor and leading man - I would so rather be a character actor. That's why I have a career.

I wasn't, like, pretty enough to be the ingenue; I wasn't 'character' enough to be the goofball sidekick. I'm kind of ethnically ambiguous.

I understand that, being born with a certain face, people want to see me in certain roles. But one needs to break that image by doing different kinds of films.

I know an actor who would play one type of part but could never get cast as tough. Once he got cast as tough, as a cop, he only got offered cop roles. It's a funny business in that regard. It's all about perception.

Unless you burst into movies as a sex goddess, you're likely to play wives and mothers. I came into movies as a teenager in 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They' (1969) playing a pregnant waif from the Ozarks. I didn't get a chance to burst into movies in 'Body Heat.' My career isn't based on having a 23-inch waist and a big bust, though I do.

There are a lot of stereotypes to be broken which I think a lot of us are doing. What I do is, as soon as people try to pin me down to one kind of part, I'll play a very different kind of role, so it explodes that stereotype.

I'm trying to fight typecasting as hard as I can, while I have time.

I don't get jobs in films by auditioning. I'm not blonde. You can't place me in movies the way you can with certain actors. It's very difficult for my agents.

You become very angry and depressed that you keep getting offered only these exceedingly demure and repressed roles. They're so not me. That's why films like Fight Club were so important to me because I think I confounded certain stereotypes and limited perceptions of what I could do as an actress.

Don't live up to your stereotypes.

When you're trying to look pretty, it's a lot easier to compare you to other people. I always felt intimidated in pilot season trying to audition for 'the girlfriend.' Whereas when it's like, 'you're auditioning for the part of this meth addict, trailer park whatever,' it's like, 'Great!'

When people start thinking of you more as a persona, they are less inclined to allow you to move into different areas. Sometimes they're wrong. Sometimes they're just very stereotypical or restricted in their own thinking of what they'll allow you to do.

You're always being cast for what you've been in last.