“I want to be the coolest aunt in the entire world.”

I was trying to get into the business from a young age, but I don’t think I really realized how much I loved it until I booked my first movie and found myself in New Zealand for six months filming Bridge to Terabithia.

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.

Things will come to you when the time is right and I say just go for it. If you love what you want to do, just keep on going.

Never give up. Just follow your dreams because this business can be so hard sometimes. It doesn’t happen overnight where you get an audition or even a callback and get the role. It takes time.

I feel like a big thing is faith – to never lose my faith and to always stay true to who I am and to never be afraid to show who I am. I think the biggest thing is: Don’t ever hide anything.

You try to become the character that you’re working with. So for me, I try to block out the cameras and try to trick my mind that this is actually happening.

Be prepared for negative responses sometimes. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s just sometimes you’re not the right look, or you’re not really what they were envisioning.

I wake up to an email from the writers with the new script, and I always get so excited because I know it’ll be better all-around than the script from the week before.

Twenty years after the Andy Griffith Show when Andy did Matlock, he hired me for four episodes. I told him I wanted to develop an Aunt Bea type role for Matlock, but he was against it.

Although born in a prosperous realm, we did not believe that its boundaries should limit our knowledge, and that the lore of the East should alone enlighten us.

Ten years ago, desalination was the crazy aunt in the attic. That’s changed. It is now entering the mainstream and being taken seriously.

That’s enough, and I have a ministry as a neighbor as well. A ministry as a friend and a ministry as an aunt and a godmother, and family is very much in the circle of my vocation.

They are not royal. They just happen to have me as their aunt.

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice.

I come from a huge family and out of all 34 of my immediate family members, my heavier influences were women. Between my grandmothers, aunts, older female cousins, and of course my mother,

However, I was very conscious of the fact that both sides of my family were drastically different and my aunts, cousins, and uncles varied in different shades of brown.