One of the first things I was taught as an actor was, 'Don't judge the character.'

As soon as I came to L.A., things immediately shifted for me. I was now actually here with the people who were making the decisions; I wasn't out in New York sending in tapes to L.A.

I studied at Howard. I studied at Oxford.

Once you start getting big roles as an actor, everything pays. So what are you making decisions on? It's about the director or the script or whatever. But before you reach that point, you're taking jobs with, say, a theater company, in spite of the fact that it's not paying your bills.

I said yes too much. I said yes to certain projects that weren't for me. It was somebody else's vision and somebody else's dream and somebody else's artistic endeavor, but it didn't necessarily fit in my grand scheme.

A superhero movie is only as great as its villains.

There's the phrase of 'making America great again,' but how did we make America great? Who did it? It was Thurgood Marshall who did it. It was Thurgood Marshall who made America live up to its constitution, to its dream. He pushed the envelope to make sure that we were equal.

I know that baseball players have certain rituals or habits that they develop, because sometimes it becomes somewhat superstitious if they get on a streak and want to do the same thing over and over again.

I think the most stressful time of my life was when I was in New York, and I didn't have money to pay my rent.

I would go through these cycles of being really, really focused on work, and not being around anyone, to being around everyone. And that could be distracting. It was nothing or everything.

I try to look at every role the same way, regardless of whether the character is real or the character is a fantasy. I always start from myself, because you have to know yourself first.

The projects that I end up doing, that I want to be involved with in any way, have always been projects that will be impactful, for the most part, to my people -- to black people.

I'd taken, like, maybe some African dance classes a couple of times, but I wasn't a musical theater person at all.

Sometimes when you're acting, you only need a little bit of something to sort of channel or, you know, transport into a place.

In TV, you're basically shooting an episode in 10 to 14 days; 14 days is a luxury situation. And in film, you have anywhere from a month to three months, or it can be even longer than that, depending on what the production is.

People have said, 'You don't need to do any more biopics. You don't need to play any more real people.' I don't agree with that.

I remember my first agent telling me -- because they found me as an actor, but I was probably more interested in writing and maybe directing -- they were like, 'Well, you can't do both things.' And I was like, 'I'm gonna show you.'

I would love to have an ocean of love right now. That said, the number-one rule of acting is, 'Do not seek approval from the audience.' People don't realize that. You can't do stuff to get applause. You have to live in the truth.

I was raised in a sort of village. I have a huge family, and I think there is strength in that. It helped me to deal with some of the complications of living in the South because I always felt like I belonged, no matter what.

I'm an artist. Artists don't need permission to work. Regardless of whether I'm acting or not, I write. I write when I'm tired in fact, because I believe your most pure thoughts surface.