My sister gave my two-and-a-half year old this book called 'And Tango Makes Three,' about the gay penguin couple at the Central Park Zoo. They cared for an orphan egg 'til it hatched and then raised the baby penguin as their own. I cannot get through this book without copious amounts of tears and snot running down my face.
Miriam Shor
I used to go and hang out at Patricia Field's store when it was on 8th street before it moved downtown. Amanda Lepore would be there, and I would be obsessed with the shoes and the make-up - everything. I just knew it was a creative place that I wanted to be around.
As the director, it's just a constant stream of meetings where you meet with all of the creatives who make all of the decisions for every part of the episodes. You're also scouting for locations, deciding on the locations, meeting with your first associate director; mine was Jennifer Truelove. She's one of my favorite people on the planet.
Eating good food is, to me, one of life's greatest joys, and I will never punish myself for it.
Everything feels so personal when you're an actor because you're so open and vulnerable, and you have to trust your director to guide you to where the storytelling needs to go.
I've got two kids who are native New Yorkers. It's kind of astonishing, raising two girls who are full-blooded New Yorkers. It's awesome and scary, because they're so much cooler than me.
The idea that you won't have a job is a real fear that people go through, so when people talk about jobs and say, 'I'm gonna create jobs!' or, 'There's gonna be a loss of jobs,' those are just words. But the reality of someone actually losing their job - I mean, it's their entire life for most people in this country.
The thing I know about Diana Trout is that she's the hardest-working person. She even says it in season one - that nobody works harder than she does. I believe that's always been true about her. That is why she has high expectations of everyone around her.
If I could go into a time machine and be in my 20s again and do 'Flora the Red Menace,' I would. That was always the one. I mean, have they done that? I don't think so. No one's done that show. That was sort of a dream role of mine.
Your job as a director is to study the show, understand the show, understand the vibe, the tone, the characters.
It really pisses me off when people look at women who are older and are not in a relationship as somehow sad or missing something, because they certainly don't look at men that way.
It is hard to be unhappy in a gay bar where everyone's singing show tunes! In fact, I've spent many a night in those kind of places - in that particular place, actually - Marie's Crisis: it's truly a New York establishment.
My philosophy is to eat as healthy as I can whenever I can, but not to beat myself up when I don't.
It's interesting in seeing when I'm talking to men in particular and telling them I'm an actress versus a director and the different turn the conversation will take when I say I'm a director. The level of respect is very interesting.
At any age, you are growing up at some level, but as far as maturing and growing up, a lot of that happens in your 20s: a lot of mistakes still to make and insecurities. But at around 27, I started to come into my own as a real adult.
I always like things to be as complicated as possible. I don't like an easy ending. I don't like when all the pieces get tied up. As a viewer who loves stories and storytelling, that annoys me.
'Hedwig' was the first audition my agent ever sent me on. I still have the slip of paper where I wrote down the appointment. I wrote down, 'Headwitch and the Angry Itch. Yitzhak. Croatian ex-drag queen billed as the last Jewess of the Balkans Krystal Nacht.'
I like when an audience doesn't know what's going to happen to a character, and I like when I don't know. I'm learning, too - I don't get the script, like, until the last day.
I don't Tweet or Twat. I'm not on Instagram or Facebook.
What I love about Encores! is that it's a tremendous amount of work in a short amount of time, but it's just so festive and so celebratory and fun. It harkens back to the old days of just getting together and putting on a show.
I did ride a bike on the streets of Manhattan with four-and-a-half inch heels. Is that fun... or a death wish? You tell me. I was in severe pain, and everyone was laughing at me. That was great. I like when people laugh at me when I'm in pain.
You might need a little more nuance in personal relationships. Climbing the work ladder is different from climbing the social ladder.
You can't just wait for everybody to give you approval - you will just be waiting.
I am always living in the now, so I like what fate brings to you. That's always fun for me. To have a process and someone be like, 'How about this?' And you just grab onto that and see where it takes you.
When I gave a direction to an actor in the show, I know their whole journey better than a guest director could know it.
I think we have a long way to go in the entertainment industry, particularly in movies, but I feel like in television, there's somebody is finally saying, 'Hey, women have stories to tell, and oddly enough, women want to hear them.'
Whatever your opinion on it, 'Sex And The City' was undeniably a show that told stories where the main focus was on women and not on men.
I do feel like, especially nowadays, we are inundated with the message that, 'Oh my God, you aren't making your own clothes? You didn't make your own bread? And you also don't have a career, and you don't look unbelievable, and you have 5 pounds on your frame? Where is your book that you haven't published yet?'
That's what I love doing - understanding another person's perspective that's really different from mine. To me, it's like an emotional puzzle, trying to figure out the humanity of a character who is very different from myself and why they think the way they do.
I do work really hard to be nice to people. Well, actually, I think it doesn't take much effort to be nice to people, so why shouldn't we all be nice to each other? But I do appreciate very much a woman who is in a position of power who is unapologetic about her position and her belief in her own abilities.
We are in love with youth culture in this country... It permeates every aspect of people's lives.
I always respond to characters who have depth. I'm always interested in those people. They're the ones who surprise you.
My dad taught at the University of Melbourne. I visited Sydney another time. Then we went up to Cairns, then down the Great Ocean Road. I have friends from Perth, where I've never been, so I'd love to do that.
I think that, as women, we're often asked to apologize for our own power, or we're asked to undercut ourselves, and it's deemed unattractive to have faith in our abilities.
I went to the gym 4 days in a row in January of 2016. That's the last time I went.
Reading 'The New Yorker' - I start on the last page and go backwards, reading all the cartoons. Then I read 'Shouts and Murmurs.' Then I read the reviews. Then I read the articles that immediately appeal to me.
I've been a fan of 'High Maintenance' since it was on Vimeo. My husband and I were obsessed with it. It's one of the best things ever made, period. It's a completely unique perspective.
I think we've all been in relationships - whether they're romantic relationships or not - where there are things that you excuse because you want it to work, because you are hopeful, because you've invested in this relationship, and you might not otherwise let them fly, but you're being optimistic.
Lily Tomlin, Judi Dench, Carol Burnett, Linda Emond, Meryl Streep, Janet Mctyre. I saw all these women on stage, and I experienced a feeling that is the artistic equivalent of huffing paint - the world kind of went away, and I felt exhilarated. Also, I drooled a little.
It would be fun to be eighty-five and have a Broadway debut. That's the goal I'm shooting for. When they revive 'Driving Miss Daisy' for the seven-hundredth time.
I always like to hang out with whoever's directing and watch what they do. I hang out at Video Village, the area where the directors and the writers and script advisors are.
I think about that with kids - you want to do everything for them, but you realize if you do everything, and you make it easy on them, they won't learn anything, and then they will walk around life needing their mamas all the time, and that isn't attractive.
I feel like a lot of women have been questioning their role in their workplaces and society, opportunities that they may have missed or haven't spoken up for.
If I was going to direct an episode of 'Younger', I wanted it to look like an episode of 'Younger.'
My very first show that I ever did was a show called 'Then Came You'. It became a huge hit - no, it didn't. But it was a sitcom with some great people involved, and the story was about an older woman and a younger guy. I was the older woman's best friend. I was 27 years old.
I remember auditioning for something where the woman was supposed to be 42, and I was 33 or something, and they were like, 'No women over 35 can audition.' That was in the breakdown. I don't think they would do that anymore - I would like to hope that they wouldn't put that in writing - but it's mind-boggling.
To be front and center watching Keri Russell work is amazing.
What I have found to be so interesting in my life and with my friends and family who have 'normal jobs' where they don't play pretend for a living is that... Hollywood is absurd but very open about its absurdity.
I really am enjoying the fact that I feel like women are having more and more say in Hollywood, in television particular.
Ageism is interesting for me because I've been playing someone in my 40s since I was 20 or so, but I have experienced it. I've been lucky in that I haven't had to play the ingenue and feel that slip away.
