Melissa Leo

“Acting is the business of truth, so that we can see ourselves reflected back and learn.”

“'Wayward Pines' has largely been, in my experience, a show left to the actors.”

“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.”

“I think this notion of acting and glamour is getting in everybody's way.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My mom was a '70s mom. She paved a road that no one had yet walked.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The power of television - it's so present in our lives, we don't even know how powerful it is.”

“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.”