I can very much enjoy taking a year off. Whereas some people would feel crippled by that, I can feel enlarged by it.
— Holly Hunter
I got the Mr. Incredible mold - the 3D, you know - it's cool.
New Yorkers have an intimacy with Trump, man. I mean, for decades.
I have never been an easy fit. I'm a leading lady character actor; I don't fit in one slot simply.
My life has a great degree of dimension without making movies.
In the life of a director - these days in particular - when it really does take so long to do a movie, with a few exceptions, actors may never work with a director again, even if they're great friends.
I bring all of myself to my roles. You only see me. You don't see anything else but me. That is who's there. They're manifestations of my own self.
I liked to carry the script into an audition because, for me, it reminded people that this was not the final performance. I'm still a work in progress.
There's a tremendous amount of humor... in very unexpected places.
People don't come to New York out of resignation. They come here with a dream. Mine was to be an actress.
Crazy people are my people? Really? I think that's silly. That's another one of those pigeonhole things. Lay somebody on an ironing board and put a scalding hot iron on them, get that going real good: 'Oh, this is who Holly Hunter is.'
In my real life, I see people who are really enjoying their lives - I mean, really enjoying their lives - and they take joy in their daily obligations; they just do. And I believe that at a certain point, you've got to choose to be that way. You choose to approach your life that way. Or it's all kind of a drag until Friday.
I love to look at physically beautiful people, and obviously others do, too. But there's such a narrow definition of what that is; the people who are my friends in life, the more I get to know them over the years, the more beautiful they are to me.
Some actors say they don't know themselves at all, and that's why they act: because they can disappear into other people.
What people have thought of me, of the turns that I've taken, has never really played into my decisions.
A play is a hard thing, particularly in L.A. It's less expensive than in New York, but there's also less of a commitment to people doing plays than in New York. So it's a strange battle.
I've always had to move between a couple of years of unemployment, where offers are not provocative enough to take, and seasons where I work nonstop for a year. It's always been an erratic rhythm.
I like to do research. It gives me a sense of ownership. That's very powerful for me as an actor to just own it.
Being somebody who's like a theater geek that I am, I can just go right back to Aeschylus and Euripides and Sophocles: they were writing about gods and goddesses versus humans, and how gods could distort, pervert, or help people get what they want.
The unknown makes people uncomfortable. And even living in a city that's as cosmopolitan as New York City is, there's so many things I don't know about other cultures, even though I encounter other cultures - maybe even 18 or 19 of them - when I get on a subway car every day.
I appreciate my instincts, but my instincts can be dead wrong. Circumspection can give you time.
I don't suffer the decisions the studio world makes.
I'm not a media personality, I'm an actress. I want to protect that thing: the suspension of disbelief. The rest of it is just distraction.
Minibars are very appealing, especially when someone else is paying.
I don't offer advice to actors only because I've seen actors become successful through ways that would never even occur to me or that wouldn't work for me. But this has worked for me: Never memorizing a scene.
The whole idea of death is something that we tend to kind of really not deal with at all.
I like the South: Southern literature and that relationship between grotesqueness and living below the Mason-Dixon line. But I also understand that people view it as a limitation - as an actor and as a person - perceptions that are really wrong: that you are ignorant and possibly illiterate, or that it's cute.
In many parts, I start from the outside and then it triggers things within. For 'The Piano,' I went, 'I'm going to learn these piano pieces. I'm going to learn this sign language, and I'm going to do them all day every day, five days a week.' It was a totally physical thing.
Characters never live with me in film the way they do on stage, and they have certain ramifications that movies just never have.
Helen Mirren is, I think, one of the fascinating actresses. Period. She captivates people and has tremendous power and charisma because she has never cashed in on being an exquisite beauty, even though I think she is. I can't say I'm anything like her, but I hope something similar will happen with me.
There were so many lead roles available when I was in my thirties. Once I hit 45, there was a real downturn. But I got an incredibly provocative, delicious lead role in a television series called 'Saving Grace,' and I loved the character.
My nucleus of friends or something protects me from the machinery that is Hollywood. I don't think I'm on the same quest that a lot of people are. I guess that could be a limitation.
After 'Broadcast News,' I could have played that same part, but I didn't want to. So I didn't follow it up with a hit.
What is God, and how do you believe in him - how do you not believe? It's a question the world continues to tussle with. People's beliefs get them in a lot of conflicts.
Even very ordinary people, upon closer examination, can often look extraordinary.
I heckled somebody at the U.S. Open once.
This is why we have racism, really: because people are confronting the unknown, and they don't like that.
I guess I'm more of a direct person than an indirect one.
After I did 'Broadcast News' and got an Academy Award nomination, the first thing I did was 'Roe vs. Wade' at NBC.
There was a drama club in our high school, and I just did plays.
You can tell young actors it's going to be very difficult, but there's no way you can understand the difficulties and the rewards through description. You have to cellularly experience it. It's a very difficult career in the long run, but at the same time, there's no long-haul career I'd rather be involved with.
I've worked with a lot of female directors over the course of my career: Martha Coolidge, Catherine Hardwicke, Jodie Foster.
If you've had intimacy in your life, you can be intimate onscreen. I mean, come on - I didn't know how to hold a gun, but I could play a cop.
As an actor, I always like some tension, some distance, between me and the character I'm playing.
It's a fantastic mirror to us to engage with art, to engage with paintings that are about tragedy, to go see Shakespearean comedies, to read a Greek play... We have always investigated the lightness and darkness of the human soul, in all these forms. So why not do it on television?
People think I disappear sporadically, but I just do projects that don't get international acclaim.
I'm not a classically beautiful person, but hopefully it increases my longevity as an actress that my career isn't dependent on my great, great good looks.
Is there a higher energy? I would say yes, even if the energy is collective. Even if it's kind of Jungian, or the whole thing is collective consciousness, that may be God as far as I'm concerned. So is there an energy that's higher than mine? Yes. But would I claim it as God? I would say no.
I don't make decisions just on the character I'm supposed to play. Sometimes it's based on the director, sometimes it's based on the story, sometimes I need money, or sometimes I'm just starved to work.
Feature films seem geared toward very large budgets, action, broad comedy. That seems to dominate all year where it used to be relegated to summer.
