I'm fine being addicted to chocolate and French fries.
— Miriam Shor
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 had to ask myself if the reason I had never asked to direct before was because I really didn't want to, or because I didn't think I deserved a spot at the table.
A really fun part of getting to be an actor is exploring those parts of yourself that you wouldn't otherwise explore.
My dad was a professor, and he had a Fulbright to teach in Venice, so we lived there when I was really little, and then we moved to Detroit, like you do. But then my parents split up, and my mom had just fallen in love with Italy, so she decided to move back to Torino.
I've always been a bit of a clown. But I think the seminal moment was when I was sixteen, and I auditioned for a little production of The 'Wizard of Oz,' and I was like, 'Clearly I'm Dorothy!' And they were like, 'We'd like you to play the Wicked Witch.'
In Hollywood, way too often, the goal for actresses is to get cast in roles as the wife or the mother or a relationship that somehow orbits around the man, whereas 'Sex And The City' had these characters where the women had their own independent stories.
Certainly my parents were very political, so the whole Berlin Wall thing - and being a kid of the '80s - that's just something that's in your experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 live near Thompson Square Park, and there are a lot of colorful people I see in the park - a lot of different personalities and homeless people - you get to know them. And every now and then, there is suddenly someone who is no longer around, and you're just like, 'Wow,' but you never really know what happened to them.
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.
Eating good food is, to me, one of life's greatest joys, and I will never punish myself for it.
I have an iPhone, but that's just because I need to take pictures of my 5- and 8 1/2-year-old kids. It becomes quite easily an addiction for people who aren't even aware that they're addicted.
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.
You might need a little more nuance in personal relationships. Climbing the work ladder is different from climbing the social ladder.
A lot of time, the characters I've played in the past kind of come out in me in situations when it's very useful.
We are in love with youth culture in this country... It permeates every aspect of people's lives.
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.
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 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.
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.
I would love to be remembered for ridding the world of disease, but my knowledge of science comes from episodes of 'Nova' and shows on the Discovery Channel. I don't think a superficial understanding of shark behavior and black holes can help cure diseases.
It's hard to kind of marry your personal life with the theater. It always works so well for my life, and then I had kids, and the thought of missing putting them to bed is a tough one for me. You know, I'm there a lot for them.
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.
Not every director does this, but I did: I made a list of every shot you're going to set up for every scene in the script.
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.
You can't just wait for everybody to give you approval - you will just be waiting.
If it's truly a passion, and it's truly something you believe in, then you need to do it.
My philosophy is to eat as healthy as I can whenever I can, but not to beat myself up when I don't.
I don't Tweet or Twat. I'm not on Instagram or Facebook.
On some level, some of the challenges end up being similar, which is when you have a very emotional scene to shoot. As an actor, you have to prepare a certain way, but you also have to prepare a certain way when you're a director because you have to be sure you're telling the whole story.
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.
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.
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 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.
'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.'
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?'
I drink as much water as I can when I remember.
