I think it's really easy for people to point out hypocrisy in people's lives. It's like yeah, I get on planes a lot, and I drank from a plastic water bottle today - you know what I'm saying? A lot of people would just be like, "Oh, you're a hypocrite. You live in an ecovillage for a month, and then you fly around the world to talk about a movie." Don't think that I don't think about those things! Don't think that that's not, like, a quandary in my life. It can be a pretty intense ethical dilemma. I think it's about figuring out, you know, navigating life.
I want to make activism a bigger part of my life, while hopefully maintaining the opportunity to help out causes that I really care about. And being an actor allows me to do that. Shooting a Cisco commercial allows me to do that. I mean, doing all these things allows me to talk about these issues. But don't think there aren't those moments where I'm like, "What am I doing? I have to quit my job and chain myself to a tree." Believe me, I have those moments.
Climate change that is occurring right now is causing so much suffering all around the world. Whether it's adding 30 million people to the "at risk of starvation" list in 2008, whether it's the floods in Pakistan, or entire cultures at risk of disappearing, or desertification in Africa - all these things that are currently being caused by climate change. I think it's something that a lot of people want to figure out: how to make the shift, how to help. It seems like such an overwhelming problem.
I feel like we've inherited modern infrastructure, and I could run away from it and become a full-time activist, or I can try to do my job, and try to talk about things I care about, and be able to do something like sponsor a topsoil conference in Nova Scotia, and talk about Bill McKibben, and narrate a documentary about the vanishing of the bees, and try to navigate my way through this world the best way possible. That's what I'm trying to figure out. Probably like many people right now.
I don't get competitive, really. So I don't know. If I'm excited about something, hopefully someone will think, "Oh right, you should do this." And that's great. I'm not being very articulate about this. I just don't want to do stuff if I'm going to feel bummed out and uninspired.
Who knows, maybe I'm just a stubborn jerk? Maybe the other people who do stuff they don't want to do, maybe they're doing the right thing. Who am I to say? I'm just doing my thing and being myself, and I've been given the incredible, fortunate opportunity to play roles that I frickin' care about and enjoy playing. And it might not last forever. That's okay. That's what it is.
I have trouble sometimes watching actors - even when they do a great job - with an accent. It kind of removes me, somehow. And maybe at some point, yeah, it could be a really cool experience. It's not something that I consciously think, "Oh yeah, I want to do a movie with an accent." Not to say that it couldn't happen.
It's already not as easy, in the sense that interesting roles for girls and women tend to be few and far between. That's just the reality that I think most people would agree with. So that can be frustrating. I just get sent so many things that are like, "So, here's another story about a guy...." But that's just what it is. I'm kind of getting more excited about developing my own stuff, or getting involved early in projects and doing my best to make things that I care about happen.
I've been in a few movies that really have the tendency to polarize people, and I kind of like that. I kind of like anything that pushes people's buttons. People will always take things as they want, and project stuff on it - it's just kind of what people do. Whether it's violence or teen pregnancy, whatever.
I do what I love to do. I have awesome people who let me make the choices I want to make. I navigate things by whether I want to play a part or not, to be honest.
If you can really hear more of the root cause, maybe there are ways that we can get beyond it, or destroy it, actually.
I think the bottom line is that we have to learn from what's going on in other countries. We have to learn from what people are doing to and live fully in really dire, hard circumstances, and then compare that to our own experience.
Do I think it would be better that people knew the atrocities that Monsanto commits or the influence of corporate money in government or government subsidies for our current food system that's a disaster and not sustainable? Yes. That would be really great, but a lot of that information unless you look for it, it's not available to you because that's not the discussion that's happening on mainstream news.
I think people who work and being alive and paying your bills and feeding your kids is hard. It's hard to have the space. Quite frankly, I'm in a privileged position to think about things, to read about things and to educate myself about things. A lot of people just don't have the time.
Absolutely, I think coming out has allowed me to align who I am with with my creative self.
Now I'm able to align my work and creative life with who I am.
I've never been to Ireland and I've always wanted to go.
That's one of my favorite songs of all time. It's so beautiful. It's an old song, sung by Nina Simone. This is the Cat Power cover. We pushed hard to get it and were lucky. It's so stunning.
I've never done a movie in that genre, and I love a lot of those movies. I watched the director's [David Freyne] short film [The First Wave], which I loved. And the script was just so good. He's found this way to tell a new story.
I recently rewatched Stand By Me and was like, "Wow, this is so powerful because these young men are so vulnerable and so emotional, and love each other." That's a rare quality for a film.
We're friends, and we're both friends with actresses our age, but we never get to work with each other because there's one girl in the movie, or whatever. For me, it was just so amazing to get to work with Evan [Rachel Wood], who I've loved forever.
I loved Thirteen and I loved Pretty Persuasion, and was always just so blown away by her [Rachel Evan Wood]. It was nice, and sadly, it is so rare.
Patricia [Rozema] is really special, and she really worked hard to make the environment and the landscapes' natural beauty come alive. She was not forceful with anything, but enabled it to really have this poetic nature.
I've always been a huge fan of Patricia's [Rozema ], as a director and as a writer, and she's a friend. For me, Patricia is one of those people who can cross genre in a way that I think has been pretty incredible, if you look at her career and the versatility of her work.
I remember having been with this book [Into the Forest] for a long time, and I remember the moment that she [Patricia Rozema] sent me the script and what it was like to read it for the first time. I just was so blown away by how she managed to capture the story and their relationship to each other, and the nuances of that.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: