Melissa Leo Quotes

You know, when I got started on television in the ’80s, you would go to the costume department, and if you were a female they put you into a skirt. And you had a pocketbook, usually a shoulder bag.

To play someone when the character masks their own emotions, doesn’t understand their own emotions, has no release for their own emotions, and yet is full of emotion – that is a much harder character to play than someone who has somewhere to put it.

To get the hippie out of certain characters is probably the most difficult thing for me. I was not a hippie by choice but by birth.

Through all of this lovely interviewing, and nice things people say, and the rest of it, I have learned that I am an actor. That is my profession. That is my job. That is how I make a living. So I am just out there making a living.

There were not enough women like Kay on TV and now there are none.

The key to acting has much more to do with listening than with talking.