Being round people I love, who really love me, who I can really be myself with... that is what makes me feel beautiful.

In real life, I'm just an actor. I play pretend. I tell stories. Your life is your story and the adventure ahead of you is the journey to fulfill your own purpose and potential.

I realized that I don't have to be perfect. All I have to do is show up and enjoy the messy, imperfect and beautiful journey of my life. It's a trip more wonderful than I could have imagined.

I didn't grow up thinking I was pretty: there was always a prettier girl than me. So I learned to be smart and tried to be funny and develop the inside of me, because I felt like that's what I had.

I am inspired by women who cultivate their inner beauty as much as their outer beauty - who are unafraid to be both smart and sexy.

My mother comes from a mixed-race background but from Jamaica, so she is partly English and Scottish and Native American, but also descended from African slaves in the Caribbean. My dad's family is four or five generations Brooklyn-based, but before that from South Carolina, and we are not sure which members of his family were slaves and which were free blacks.

[on her mother's reaction to her in role of Ophelia in a student production of "Hamlet"] I thought, "Wow." This woman who held me in her womb for nine months -- and knows exactly who I am -- for a moment something about this world allowed her to suspend her disbelief and believe I was some other person in some other time. I thought, "This is powerful.".

My very first feature, Our Song (2000), was an independent film that was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. I always feel like I was able to start off my career on the right foot by starting off in independent film because that's where the real work ethic is and that's where the real artistry is, and every now and then you're lucky with a movie like Django Unchained (2012) to do a studio film that's filled with just as much artistry and passion.

It's in the same way that I don't read my reviews. I try not to get involved in all that stuff because what's important to me is the work and however the work lives in the world is out of my control.

I try not to let my politics limit me artistically, and you know say like "Well, I can't do that because I don't ever want to play a black prostitute" or "I can't do that because I don't ever want to play, you know a drug addict." I really try not to do that. What's important to me is to make sure my characters ring true that they reflect a trueness to society because if I can bring out the true humanity of a character than I'm not perpetuating a stereotype I'm actually revealing a truth.

I don't think I'm even close to fulfilling my potential. And I think also that, unlike a pianist or a flutist, an actor has an instrument that is constantly changing.