Top 30 Melissa Leo Quotes

Supporting actors are the support. You can’t make a building without support. You can’t buy dinner without support.

You have to let the costume inform you.

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.

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.

I’m not a particularly ambitious actress. I love to go and do my work, head down in the dirt, and be the character.

I’m very old-school. I like a director to direct me. I like to be the actor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

More often, I’m asked to play somebody’s mother, somebody’s partner, somebody’s wife.

Being an actor on a movie set is like going to the playground at recess.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That’s probably the biggest secret of acting: If the actor believes it themselves, they can make you believe it.

I think this notion of acting and glamour is getting in everybody’s way.

The power of television – it’s so present in our lives, we don’t even know how powerful it is.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.