“I would love to play Jimi Hendrix.”

I can definitely dance, but pedestrian dancing.

I’m not so keen on letting my car drive itself.

I don’t have a smart house. My house is very dumb.

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.

I’d taken, like, maybe some African dance classes a couple of times, but I wasn’t a musical theater person at all.

I can’t even imagine something being more fun than playing James Brown onstage.

I don’t read reviews, but I do get feedback from my peers and people I know, like other actors and directors and producers.

I think there’s a difference between a working actor, a movie star and a celebrity. They’re all three different things.

Sometimes when you’re acting, you only need a little bit of something to sort of channel or, you know, transport into a place.

As a director, it is important to understand the actor’s process.

I might have had too many friends in my twenties.

I think the most stressful time of my life was when I was in New York, and I didn’t have money to pay my rent.

In television you don’t have a lot of time to spend with the role or the script. Typically you get a script a week prior to shooting. Sometimes it’s even less time, not enough time to dream about the role.

The industry looks for white actors and actresses, but it’s not the same for black actors. We have to really put the work in.

I wasn’t a comic book geek as a kid. I read some, but it was just like, ‘Oh, I have this comic book here.’ It wasn’t like I was collecting them.

When you’re doing a character, you want to know the full landscape. You want to know them spiritually, mentally and physically.

I honestly don’t even know how I got into acting. It happened so quickly because my mom and sister used to do commercials, and apparently when I was little I would unbuckle myself from the stroller and crash their auditions.

You never know what’s going to happen. That’s why I like acting. It’s precious to me to be able to live more than one life.

Acting to me is real life – I don’t act.

I check all my props, everything. Acting is something I love. I have done it since I was 13 but it had completely taken over my life absolutely.

Acting without thinking is like shooting without aiming.

I started going to acting school when I was 14, and I would always have my own take on things.

Where I grew up, acting wasn’t really accessible. I was just playing sports. But, I did watch a lot of TV. I watched a lot of Clint Eastwood movies on TV and had this fantasy of being like him when I grew up.

An acting teacher once told me, ‘Greet everything with yes… Even if you abandon one idea for another one, saying yes allows you to move forward.’