Sarita Choudhury

“The first time I put on the hijab, it felt weird, like I was wearing a scuba-diving suit kind of thing.”

“It was strange wearing the scarf and the hijab until I got used to it.”

“I wanted to move between film and theater - I never felt like I fit into TV. And I'm very anti-TV, like, 'I'm never going to do TV,' but also, TV didn't want me either, so it was kind of perfect. And then, of course, cable happened, and suddenly it was like, 'Oh, I could do that kind of stuff.'”

“For 'For Real,' where I play a singer who has to give up her passion for her husband and family, I practised singing for hours, in bathroom, in subways, though I am tone deaf.”

“Theatre is highly satisfying in terms of words. You get to speak in monologues; words drive the action.”

“I am trained in theatre, and so I take time to study and get into the skin of a character.”

“I love Bollywood films, but I have been trained in independent cinema.”

“I would do Bollywood, but I don't know if I could do that - the dance, the singing, the kind of flirting with your eyes, the outfits.”

“After a two-year stint at Cheek by Jowl theatre company in London, I put all my energies into breaking into New York's theatre scene. It took me eight years to build enough to play lead roles.”

“See, all actors pretend. I enjoy that pretence. I don't wear heels in real life, but if it is for a character, I love to get into the traits of the person I am playing.”

“Having grown up in different countries - Jamaica, Italy, U.K. - I catch the accents quite easily. In the U.S., they don't know where I am from!”

“A few years ago, I got cast as a white boy in an off-Broadway play. So not only was it colour-blind, it was gender-blind as well. That would never happen in film.”

“Anything, really - I'm as comfortable playing an Indian as playing a black woman or a South American.”

“My first time nude was with a woman director, so I thought it would be easy, but it wasn't.”

“It's like everyone says they love my body, but then I'm supposed to lose weight.”

“I have an Indian father, and when you grow up in a house with an Indian father, culturally, that's what becomes dominant in the house. So that's the tradition we grew up with.”

“No matter how much I read the news, I feel slightly ignorant all the time.”

“I was raised around the world.”

“People are always asking me if the industry is changing, and my answer is always that it is changing only as much as we are. Many South Asian actors complain about being pigeonholed into playing terrorists and cab drivers, but it's time that we stop talking about it. The industry will always say 'No' till we have enough to convince them.”

“Theatre reminds me of Bollywood.”