“In order to have skin that glows and looks healthy and actually is healthy, you need to look at the whole picture and have a holistic approach to it. A lot of it is exercising regularly, drinking enough water, getting enough sleep, and keeping stress down.”
“We live in the Facebook era. I think everyone, not just celebrities, have an unprecedented level of self-awareness, of presenting yourself to the world. The truth is, it starts with how you look, and that goes into how you dress.”
“I put so much pressure on myself to be perfect. Between homework and sports and drama and being social, I slept about four hours a night through high school and college.”
“I’ve been dumped hard. My heart has been broken and shattered, and I’ve also been on the other end of that too.”
“I’m a big Aqua fan. ‘Barbie Girl’ was a big deal growing up.”
“The blessing of having your first project be something as fantastic as ‘Girls’ is that it gave me room to be selective because I didn’t feel pressure to do other things. The curse is that my standards were really high.”
“I would prefer to keep my clothes on. Unless there’s a brisk breeze or something, I tend to keep them on.”
“I’ve done so many funny jobs. I worked at a farmer’s market through high school. I worked in the stock room of Ralph Lauren. I graduated to salesperson at Ralph Lauren, which was a big deal to me. I’ve been a P.A. I’ve been a stand-in. I’ve been an assistant’s assistant.”
“For cardio, I do SoulCycle. I really don’t like to run, plus I have terrible knees and get bored on the elliptical. SoulCycle is basically a dance party on a bicycle, and you burn calories, and it’s so fun.”
“In real life, we do things out of character, constantly. A couple of days ago, my shoes were hurting, so I walked barefoot through New York. Someone who has known me my whole life would think that was so out of character. But I did it because of the circumstances.”
“I was only allowed only to watch public television until I was 12 years old. I would come home from friends’s houses with a list of demands. ‘OK, We have all the wrong cereals. You guys are asleep on the job.’”
“I started out really into musical theater. So you can imagine I was super popular. I wasn’t awkward looking at all.”
“Sometimes fake laughing is hard once you’ve done a scene 18 times. I don’t want to brag, but I have a reputation for being very, very good at that. It’s funny finding what’s challenging about acting as you go.”
“My whole background is character acting: weird costumes, fat suits, playing men, playing animals – I’ve never played anyone with whom there’s any overlapping Venn diagram.”
“It’s safe to say I’m a comedy nerd. I listen to so many podcasts. I just love to laugh.”
“I don’t understand how some of these young actresses are wearing such provocative, editorial items, when they haven’t even established a career yet. It’s hard to see past that. I’m not so sure that’s smart in the long run.”
“I’m so happy that I finished college. Going into this crazy vortex of scrutiny is tough. If I was younger than I was now and I was going to fashion shows, I might have this distorted sense of self. I might rely on those cameras. Because when I was 18, I was half-baked.”
“I just have always been so interested in the way actors and actresses present themselves to the world because I think it is very important and it affects the way people see you as an actor.”
“I’m drawn to what I’m drawn to. I wear jeans and loafers everyday, mostly casual, but when I really turn it on, I like a classic, simple look.”
“My dad keeps joking about sneaking into my grandparents’ house and switching out their HBO for PBS so they think I’m on ‘Downton Abbey.’”
“It’s very weird waking around a corner and being nose to nose with myself on the side of a bus. And Times Square – that’s the craziest one.”
“When I graduated from college in early 2010, I decided that I needed to create a calling card, some kind of business card that people can link to my name and face. So I did this ‘Mad Men Theme Song… With a Twist’ music video. I released it just as I moved to L.A.”
“I’ve wanted to act since I was little, but my parents told me I couldn’t pursue it until after college. The understanding was that I was lucky enough to be able to go to college and that it’s important to being successful in life.”
“I auditioned for ‘Girls’ the fall after I graduated from Yale. The show has been amazing – as close to perfect as it gets!”
“I think I’ve always had that bird’s-eye view of myself. I think it’s an actor trait… Sometimes it’s best just to get lost out there, but other times you have to be aware of where the light’s hitting you.”
“The idea of a young girl who knows exactly what she wants with her life is the most threatening and unappealing thing you can imagine.”
“I operate with this sense of needing to live up to what I am asking of people. I am, by far, my own worst critic.”
“I will have my publicist pull pictures of the way I look at events so I can see, ‘Oh, that cut is not as flattering as I thought,’ or ‘I should smile bigger,’ or ‘That positioning is odd.’ I learn from it.”
“Actors are like Swiss Army knives – we’re ready to use any lever at any moment. But I learned long ago that, unfortunately, this industry only sees the one thing sticking out that they know us from, and that’s the only thing they can imagine.”
“A lot of guys I know loved ‘Sex and the City.’ They’ll take it to their grave, but they watched every episode of it.”
“I was only allowed only to watch public television until I was 12 years old.”
“I’ve put on makeup just for fun since I was a really little girl. Now I keep a look book for inspiration – with hair, makeup, beauty tips and products to try.”
“I invested in a blow-dryer. I do a very simple blow out that I’ve gotten quite good at. I’m ambidextrous. I often wonder why people’s hair looks lopsided. It’s because it’s hard to reach both sides of your hair.”
“My mom has beautiful eyes, and I inherited a lot of her rituals, accentuating eyes.”
“I’m a major breath person, so I always have gum, mints.”
“I am not someone who thinks that a million products will mean that you’ll look perfect.”
“I try to always have a hair cut that I don’t have to style every day, so I’ll usually just let my hair air dry.”
“I definitely hand myself over to the hair and makeup gods of ‘Girls.’ Our look on the show is very specific, and it’s different from mine in real life, although I’ve definitely learned things from working with both the hair and makeup people for the show.”
“I love Emma Watson’s makeup a lot. I love Cate Blanchett. I’m biased, though. I love my makeup artist, Julie Harris; she is really phenomenal, but everyone has their technique, and there are incredible-looking girls out there.”
“The Emmys is great, but the Golden Globes, you have the stars of television and the stars of movies in one place.”
“I can rap. Not openly in the world, but it’s important that people know! I can rap for a very specific reason, which is that in college I was in an improv comedy group, and we did musical improv.”
“I’m an obsessive musical theatre person, so some of the most formative albums for me were, you know, the ‘Phantom Of The Opera’ soundtrack or ‘Into The Woods.’”
“I told my parents I wanted to be an actress years before I wrapped my head around what my dad did for a living. It’s not easy to explain the job of the television journalist, especially when a lot of my friends’ dads had jobs that were a lot easier to explain, like a lawyer, a banker or a doctor.”
“It’s a normal thing for people to do, going on Facebook and seeing pictures of their exes with their new significant others.”
“Everyone wants to feel like they were the one and only person that the other person could ever fall in love with.”
“One of my favorite things to do is to play music really loud and dance my butt off in the morning. I’ll do it alone in my apartment. You can’t have a bad day after that.”
“I love dancing. It’s one of my favorite things in the whole world.”
“Look at Jennifer Aniston: She’s America’s sweetheart for a reason. You know what she’s going to look like when she shows up to something, and there’s something so comfortable about that.”
“I want to play a villain. I want to play a romantic heroine.”
“’Girls’ was my first audition. I’d just taken an audition class, and I was excited to implement those tools.”
“I’m a master assembler of Ikea furniture, in case anyone wants to know.”
“You don’t want to keep giving yourself a sugar spike and then crash and get exhausted and need coffee because you shoot for a long time. On set, I eat a lot of peanut butter and apples, things that have actual energy and protein in them to keep me going.”
“I’m not a dieter. I have the palate of a 7-year-old boy, although I’m working on it. I order off the kids’ menu! I’m working hard to eat more fruit and veggies and round it all out, but I’m a big pretzels and Diet Coke kind of girl.”
“I am private because I’m still figuring things out. I’m young! I’m making it up as I go!”
“I’m very protective; it’s in my wiring.”
“I feel that too much singing annoys people.”
“It took years and a lot of diligence on my part. But I’ve formed my own thing, and now I get people who are surprised to find out he’s my dad. I dreamed that would happen, and it has: I’m no longer introduced to people as Brian Williams’ daughter.”
“Worst advice? I either don’t remember it or I’ve been very lucky in terms of getting good advice.”
“The idea of doing something that I’ve never done before, that presents a new challenge, that forces me to stretch in some way – that’s kind of a perfect project for me, and especially something that has greater social, conversational ramifications. I mean what more could you want?”
“I always ask, ‘Is this movie essential? Does this movie need to exist? Does it need to exist right now?’ And the answer to that is almost always no.”
“I cannot wait until the day I can go back to school… I’ve already picked my program: anthropology at Columbia. I will not get in, but a girl can dream.”
“I do not want to ask people to go consume something unless I think it is important in some way.”
“We’re just a big media family. My mom is always sending us articles throughout the day. My husband now works at Facebook… so it’s just a very high-paced media culture, our texts. It’s links and photos, and all hours of the day, because my dad, my brother, and I are night owls, and my mom and my husband wake up early.”
“I am in the fortunate-enough position where I can be picky.”
“Catherine Keener is everyone’s dream sister slash mom slash aunt.”
“As an actor, I love the feeling of being on set and the camaraderie of working on something together.”
“When I was little, I used to watch Disney movies all the time, and it drove me crazy that Cinderella’s tights wouldn’t gather at her ankle when her foot bent, so I kept trying to make sure that I didn’t get those little creases on my ankle because Cinderella didn’t have them.”
“I will never actually be able to know what it’s like to go through life in someone else’s body.”
“To try and to pretend that there’s no difference between where we come from is so dumb.”
“With ‘Girls,’ Marnie was a slow burn; she shifted over time. With ‘Get Out,’ I was suddenly faced with the pressure that, like, I need an audience to know Rose deeply within 15 minutes, within a couple scenes. And that’s not something I’ve ever done before.”
“I would never tell someone else how to use their platform, because I think I’m much more comfortable allowing the work that I do to speak for itself.”
“In most cases, no one asks what I think, and so for me to be ready to volunteer it unprompted, I have to feel very ready to accept whatever is coming next.”
“Trying to imagine what it’s like to be someone else is never a substitute for actually living that way, for acknowledging the respect that we need to have for each other’s experiences.”
“Showing ‘Get Out’ to a room full of strangers and having them react lets them be introspective and see the way certain images affect other people.”
“I love seeing blank days in my calendar.”
“I know what I’m like when I don’t have a project coming up, and that’s the mode I’m almost more comfortable in. That’s when I get really scrappy and creative.”
“I was in character all the time when I was little.”
“There’s no trajectory to follow. Even if you were to say, ‘OK, I’m going to model my ascent based on this other person’s,’ luck and timing play such a big part that it’s really futile.”
“I have a doughnut every morning. The same kind, from a street cart. Vanilla frosted with sprinkles on one half, weirdly. How hard is it to sprinkle the whole thing?”
“I wake up every morning thinking I need to be edgier.”
“I read very one-note. Teacher’s pet, Goody Two-shoes. I’d hate to be annoying. Who wants to see movies with someone annoying in them? But it’s hard for me to paint myself as anything but whatever it is I come across as – which is pretty together.”
“I don’t want to be any more interesting than I am. I love the life that I get to live, which is one of real independence and privacy and autonomy.”
“Even when I was a child, my best friend was a 92-year-old woman.”
“I am traditional: a big note writer, and I like using the phone.”
“There are lots of things about me that aren’t like the rest of my friends. But I try to learn as much about millennials as I can so I can stay afloat among them.”
“A good number of my friends are married, which seems very old-fashioned.”
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