Quotes

[commenting on her role as Allison DuBois in her TV series Medium (2005)] I wanted to play a woman who looks normal. It's important for me to be real.

I liked the premise of this material. I love the marriage relationship. They kind of keep each other honest, and they enjoy each other's sense of humor. Kind of a sexy but boring relationship.

Hippy people had a hopeful idea of what they wanted the world to be like, then most of them changed into corporate Yuppies. But I still have that hippy thing underneath somewhere.

You want your partner to objectify you.

We all have our own little thing, I think.

Neither of us entered marriage thinking it wouldn't be a strain. Life has strains in it, and he's the person I want to strain with.

I grew up in a hippie commune so I have a real hippie part of me.

I find that men are far more vain than women.

I don't read my reviews, but I have a bunch of them and I will when I'm 80.

I don't have a goal but I just want to work on movies that I really like.

[on her character in Boyhood shutting out her husband's abuse] Now, I wouldn't be like that. I would climb across the table and stab him in the head with a fork.

[on her vulnerable and melancholy rawness] Every man I've loved has tried to find it, fix it, soothe it.

The business has changed in every way. Back in the day, when Vivien Leigh was cast as Scarlett O'Hara, you know, she was relatively unknown, and every big star in the world wanted to do that part. Now they would just cast the biggest star. Financiers don't support their directors to cast properly. They don't have the vision of an artist, they're casting to spreadsheets and it's making movies very mediocre. The movie business used to just be called the movies. Now it should be the business movies.

[on her experience working with Heather Langenkamp] Heather was very warm and maternal to all of us even though she was basically our peer.

[on why she didn't reprise her role as Kristen Parker in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)] They asked me to come back for 4 but at that time I was starting to break into kind of meatier roles. I had just done a movie of the week about teen pregnancy called Daddy and I was really liking getting deeper with my work. I love the horror genre and the Freddy franchise but I was chomping at the bit to try other things as an actor.

[on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)] We had a cinematographer who came in and was pretty militant and mean. He dressed like an SS officer wearing jodhpurs and shiny boots. He had a scary mustache and I remember him yelling at me where the hell did you find this girl. Thank God for the rest of the crew and the cast. They were all great.

[on her experience working with Laurence Fishburne] Laurence was already much more worldly and complicated in his thinking and talking about material. I felt in awe of him. His comfort in screen. He always seemed loose and in his body.

[as actresses turning fifty in Hollywood] It's always been the norm that that they were really ready to put you out to pasture. What's opening doors is these new streams of original content. They need material. At the same time, you have real-life crime stories that started doing well. They all lumped together at a perfect moment in my life.