“An actor has to be very, very careful, as one of the most wonderful props – and actors love props – is a cigarette. There’s so much to do with it: you can bring it up to your face, play with the smoke. It’s just the greatest – ever since I was 16 and in acting school in England, I’ve been playing around with cigarettes.”
― Melissa Leo
“You ask me a question. I have a blank mind. You ask me a question, and the question is informed, and you’re interested, and now my mind starts popping. That’s what conversation is. That’s what communicating is.”
― Melissa Leo
“I am a smoker, I’m ashamed to say. I had given it up for many years, then picked it up again. It’s a horrible habit. I struggle with myself all the time. And I love to smoke.”
― Melissa Leo
“If I’m going to get an ice cream cone two or three times a week, then it’s a pleasure. No guilt.”
― Melissa Leo
“I mean, the unfair treatment of women and black people and Indians and other groups, that’s real. Mistreatment of other people because ‘I’m better than you are’ is such a sad part of the world.”
― Melissa Leo
“An actor’s life is fairly lonely.”
― Melissa Leo
“I do wish everyone would call me Leo. It’s not that I don’t like Melissa. But the more I hear it called out, the worse it sounds.”
― Melissa Leo
“Well, I don’t think of myself as a feminist at all. As soon as we start labeling and categorizing ourselves and others, that’s going to shut down the world.”
― Melissa Leo
“Being an actor on a movie set is like going to the playground at recess.”
― Melissa Leo
“There were not enough women like Kay on TV and now there are none.”
― Melissa Leo
“I have some close friends I keep in touch with. I knit. I watch a little too much TV. I ski, if the weather’s right for that. If I can find a group of buddies, I go rock climbing.”
― Melissa Leo
“That’s probably the biggest secret of acting: If the actor believes it themselves, they can make you believe it.”
― Melissa Leo
“The climate informs the character.”
― Melissa Leo
“The power of television – it’s so present in our lives, we don’t even know how powerful it is.”
― Melissa Leo
“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.”
― Melissa Leo
“I’m a very lucky girl who gets to act for a living! So why sit around griping and grousing about what’s not there.”
― Melissa Leo
“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.”
― Melissa Leo
“People often expect me to be something other than what I am.”
― Melissa Leo
“I’m not particularly fond of the hybrid writer-director or actor-director.”
― Melissa Leo
“I’m very old-school. I like a director to direct me. I like to be the actor.”
― Melissa Leo
“The key to acting has much more to do with listening than with talking.”
― Melissa Leo
“I haven’t had a lot of experience with glamour. I’ve never had to mask myself, as many now not-so-young actresses have had to do. Female actors in that regard have a different lot in life than male actors.”
― Melissa Leo
“I think this notion of acting and glamour is getting in everybody’s way.”
― Melissa Leo
“Supporting actors are the support. You can’t make a building without support. You can’t buy dinner without support.”
― Melissa Leo
“I think there has only been one time in my entire career that I’ve ever gone back to shoot a scene. And it was a scene that, when we were shooting it, we knew that it wasn’t working. We knew there was a disagreement between the actor and director. So, we went back.”
― Melissa Leo
“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.”
― Melissa Leo
“Acting is the business of truth, so that we can see ourselves reflected back and learn.”
― Melissa Leo
“I think the funny thing about acting for me – and I hold it in a very holy, spiritual way – not to be overly fundamentalist about it, but it’s that important to me – is that it is an ancient healing art.”
― Melissa Leo
“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.”
― Melissa Leo
“My mom was a ’70s mom. She paved a road that no one had yet walked.”
― Melissa Leo
“Ever since Marilyn Monroe was transformed from one of the prettiest girls you could ever hope to see into an icon, everyone has been trying to repeat that icon. And now the entire industry is filled with, and by and large run by, wannabes.”
― Melissa Leo
“My body has done for me all these years things I couldn’t ever even dreamt to do for characters. It’s a tool, molecularly speaking, and I need to take care of it.”
― Melissa Leo
“I do get a fair amount of scripts; I got ‘Frozen River’ kinda just that way. I have a hard time turning my back on anybody who says they have something for me.”
― Melissa Leo
“I got none. I mean, I have no religion. I like the quote unquote ‘Virgin Mary,’ but no Catholicism.”
― Melissa Leo
“That’s what acting is. You’re not alone. It’s reacting. That’s what we do.”
― Melissa Leo
“I am that lucky woman who has been living my life all my life. Anything can happen now. Anything. And it will be only whip cream and delightful things. Even in the conflict and the hardship.”
― Melissa Leo
“Acting, it’s hit or miss. Make them laugh, make them cry; hopefully they have a little entertainment.”
― Melissa Leo
“To be a comic, you must reveal yourself in your most grotesque nudity. And it’s only then, when the truth gets told, when the audience recognizes it somewhere in themselves, that they get that great medicine of laughter.”
― Melissa Leo
“More often, I’m asked to play somebody’s mother, somebody’s partner, somebody’s wife.”
― Melissa Leo
“I rarely know too much about anything I’m getting involved in.”
― Melissa Leo
“I can nap with hustle and bustle around me; I can nap quietly all by myself. It’s something I’ve always been good at.”
― Melissa Leo
“I know what it meant to me to play the Reverend Mother, a role I’ve, in some ways, prepared a lifetime to do. It’s why I took the part.”
― Melissa Leo
“I’m not a particularly ambitious actress. I love to go and do my work, head down in the dirt, and be the character.”
― Melissa Leo
“Docudrama is not really my game, but it’s interesting to play real people; it’s interesting to play ‘real.’”
― Melissa Leo
“Hire me for the next picture. I don’t have to just play down-and-out trailer trash and mean, old, wicked, old nuns. I could play a princess or a queen. That’s all I wanted to do. Because campaigning does go on. It’s a part of selling the film.”
― Melissa Leo
“Why do we have to pretend we’re not in the sales game? I didn’t sign on to be a salesman. I signed on to be an actor.”
― Melissa Leo
“I always wanted to play a nun, and to play the Reverend Mother was a thrill of a lifetime for me. But, generations back, my family were not churchgoers, which is an unusual thing in the United States.”
― Melissa Leo
“As an actor, you live a little bit of a cloistered life. It’s a lonely life. You oddly, strangely find yourself all alone, quite often, with a lot of time to think.”
― Melissa Leo
“I know that one of my difficulties as an actor is to try to do too much, from all those years ago when my acting took place live on a stage. It was just my shiny face there, so you’ve gotta be super careful how much over-expressing you’re doing with your eyes and nose and so on.”
― Melissa Leo
“You have to let the costume inform you.”
― Melissa Leo
“I live in the country, and I live a fairly natural, holistic life. Sometimes I get put up in hotels where they use chemical sprays to clean things, or there are chemicals used that I stay away from.”
― Melissa Leo
“Wayward Pines, I tell you, is a strange place, and the entry is always the hardest part. I was just going along for the ride.”
― Melissa Leo
“’Wayward Pines’ has largely been, in my experience, a show left to the actors.”
― Melissa Leo
“I’m interested in what the fans think, in what would make them feel connected to the Wayward Pines they had grown to love. I had a lot of fun thinking about the first season.”
― Melissa Leo
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