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I didn't want to play Tasty in the beginning. Why not? You know, because she was an inmate and because I was nervous coming out of Juilliard, 21 years old, like, oh my gosh, I'm about to play an inmate and what is that, you know, saying about Black women, you know, what viewpoint am I putting out about Black women?

Fresh Air
1d ago

And his first note and recurring note to me is yes, that's great, it's very funny, now let's make it true. And I think that's his great gift to this material is that he's given it a great big sort of beating Arthurian heart. And that's an extra dimension that you just sort of don't expect.

2w ago

I hadn't relied on those comedic chops in a long time. So to lean into that was something that felt new and fresh again for me, especially this late in my career, where the idea of doing a half-hour comedy was a challenge. I wanted to see if I could do it more than anything.

3w ago

We spend our adulthood trying to cover feeling and trying to numb ourselves and distract ourselves. And so acting we get back to the source of like these raw exposed unhinged feelings

3w ago

I love opportunities to turn my back on the audience. I love to sort of take it too far to try to push myself to a place or push the audience to a place where they can no longer be with this character, but then try to win them back through showing the fragility of their heart, showing how brokenhearted they are, showing how much pain they have, because I do think pain is a real adhesive. And I think it's the thing that really connects all of us.

1mo ago

There's the joke that we have as actors of the five stages of your career. There's who is Wendell Pierce? Get me Wendell Pierce. Get me someone like Wendell Pierce. Get me a younger Wendell Pierce. And then the last and final and fifth stages, who is Wendell Pierce?

2mo ago
Fresh Air
John Lithgow

You look for ways you can empathize with every character. And if you're playing a scoundrel of any stripe, you just try to make it interesting. You try to figure out what made him that way.

5mo ago

I think actors look for characters that are layered and by that I mean may contradict themselves. They break the stereotype, let's put it that way, if they contradict themselves.

6mo ago

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