Jewel Staite

“I started out doing things like 'Flash Forward,' where I was the girl-next-door, and then, I did a show called 'Higher Ground,' where I played this really mean, sarcastic girl. Then 'Firefly' happened, and everybody thought of me as this bubbly, sweet girl-next-door again.”

“I have no desire to direct at all. I know how much pressure it is, and, trust me, it's so much easier and so much more fun to be an actor.”

“I've just always loved really good projects. The things that draw me into a new project have very little to do with genre and have more to do with the characters I'll be playing, the people I'll get to work with and things like that.”

“The sci-fi genre just happens to have a lot of really great characters for women.”

“I've had to gain weight for roles and ugly myself up for roles. So yeah, I'm game. I'm game for that kind of thing. I'm certainly not too vain in that respect. If it's a great role, I'm willing to do whatever it is that it takes.”

“There's nothing better than a sci-fi fan, let me tell you. Once you're in with them, you're in for life.”

“The fact of the matter is that we're all aging, and there's this stigma that older actresses don't work as much as younger actresses, and I don't think that's true anymore.”

“My job is never boring. It's always new, exciting, and challenging, and I get a rush every time I go to work. I'm the luckiest person on the planet to be able to do what I love for a living.”

“I am not a food critic. Or a chef. Or even a professional writer. What I am schooled in the art of, however, is enjoying myself.”

“I've never been a particular fan of any genre.”

“I had an amazing time on 'Stargate: Atlantis', and a really great run on that show, which was shot in my hometown. It was kind of a dream job.”

“I think 'Teenage Wasteland' was one of those cult hits like 'My So-Called Life', something that came along and got a lot of viewers and then somehow fell into a bad timeslot that nobody ever watched, and then the network pulled the plug prematurely.”

“'Firefly' was and always will be such a positive thing for me. I hold a lot of really good memories associated to that show.”

“The only real difference between shooting 'Firefly' and 'Serenity' was that on 'Serenity,' we had a lot more freedom with time. When you're shooting a television show, you usually have anywhere between six and nine pages of script to shoot a day, and only twelve hours to do it. But with 'Serenity,' we could shoot one scene all day long.”