What I want to do is play roles as a black man, instead of playing black man's roles. You know?
I'm not in the business of making us look clean, but I don't want us to look like monsters either. I think there is a little bit of hero and villain in all of us.
It's far too rare an experience for Asian American girls to see themselves in media.
Once you're sort of pigeonholed into something, it's quite difficult to get out of it. I have no aversion to playing a gay character again, but it would definitely have to be the right role.
I feel responsible to my people to portray them the way we should be.
I've been trying to get cast as a lesbian for years.
I think of clothes a lot like costumes. I think of what I wear in real life as being my real life character's costume.
The fact that I'm able to portray these complex, fully realized, queer Asian characters? I never thought it would be in this position. You just never see those types of characters and that type of representation.
After that, I was offered lots of lesbian roles, but I didn't want them because I'd already played the best there was.
If we're reading a first-person account, we know that each and every one of us, myself included, have a great desire to be seen in a certain way, or to be perceived in a certain way. It's unavoidable.
Until 'Moonlight,' I had never seen one black man cook for another on screen. But I wanted the characters to be free of 'groundbreaking' or 'never before.' We were ascribed those things. They weren't the point.
A lot of times I don't know if I trust the director to tell that film's story. Or I think it's inappropriate for a male director to tell a female story, or a white director to tell a black story. Everyone walks away from a movie differently, because you're relating it to your own life.
The fact that I'd never really seen myself on screen allowed for a blissful ignorance. It didn't feel like a movie. I didn't have that self-consciousness. It was a game that I was playing.
Any time you put on the mouthpiece of somebody that you're not, there's a professional responsibility to get it right. I did a great deal of research in both of those arenas.
If I were making paintings of a bowl of fruit it would still be viewed through some sort of political lens, because the viewer wants to create a type of narrative around the political theme when they look at work depicting black and brown models.
