Rose Byrne

I just want to continue being able to get roles that scare me and make me better and I think I can only grow as an artist if I do things that are scaring me and making me uncomfortable because that’s the only place you’ll learn anything.

I’m starting to know how the world works a bit, and I’m learning more and more that the only thing that matters is what happens between ‘action’ and ‘cut’. I’m allowing myself to be a bit more selfish, for want of a better word, just that it’s OK to focus and that I don’t have to be nice to everybody.

I think its important to keep an element of fear about yourself because it makes you appreciate the jobs.

Here in L.A. the standard of beauty is kind of ridiculous. I want to be doing this when I’m in my fifties and sixties and this isn’t what I’m going to look like.

[on Brad Pitt] I don’t know… I guess…. he’s a nice person and a GOOD kisser!

I did audition for “Home and Away”, but they never called me back. I feel I escaped in a way.

Because if you do what you think is right for the benefit of everybody and everything and you make decisions, to go back and regret them afterwards-it’s a futile experience and it’s not worth thinking about. Because life just unfolds. Provided you do your best and you think you’re on the right track, you can only be right or wrong. But to regret it-I don’t think there are any huge errors or misdemeanors. You know, I should have hung out with Elvis a bit more.

I didn’t really have any idea of what Hollywood was except that it was a place where the made movies.

Everyone has an idea that they think would be a great movie. Everyone has a cousin who they think you should work with. Everyone has a warped vision of Hollywood and what success in Hollywood is like. That you love cocaine and that you spend every night in orgies with models. If only it were true.

There’s nothing wrong with getting 20 million viewers, but I think there’s something wrong with aiming at getting 20 million viewers, because then you have to take away all the things that will offend, and you’ll end up with something so anodyne that it just washes over you for half an hour. I imagine The Office was also one of the most hated shows on television, that some people passionately hated it. But that’s better, for me. David Bowie said that after Let’s Dance, which is his biggest album ever and obviously not his best, he was doing these stadium gigs and looked out at the audience and suddenly realized that he had Phil Collins fans instead of Iggy Pop fans. And that’s how I feel about everything I do: I want Iggy Pop fans.

For anyone who feels the need to hate, just know I’m looking at my phone like #GirlBye!

[on filming Red Eye] I loved the action sequences, running though an airport in heels and all that stuff. That was really fun.

Optimism is nice if you can swing it. But you’ve got to be careful, because it can feed into the normalization of Donald Trump. And he is not normal. He’s abnormal. He’s a human What is wrong with this picture?

When Yale reached out, I thought it was a hoax, but they really followed through.

You could put a blond wig on a hot-water heater and some dude would try to f**k it.

When you’re thirty-five, you can’t take as much booze … and I always got a little violent on drink…So it was kind of self-destructive suicide side of me, which is resolving itself for the better, I believe, because I never enjoyed it…

Any time that people think enough of you to put up something that’s everlasting is only going to make you feel good.

Whatever the occasion, [the Queen] has a face which demonstrably says ‘I don’t give a royal s**t.’

[While Amy Poehler and I were doing press for Sisters,] every single interviewer asked, ‘Isn’t this an amazing time for women in comedy?’ People really wanted us to be openly grateful-‘Thank you so much!’-and we were like, ‘No, it’s a terrible time. If you were to really look at it, the boys are still getting more money for a lot of garbage, while the ladies are hustling and doing amazing work for less.’

[On working with Woody Allen] That was a very surreal experience: I had studied the script right down to the punctuation marks, and then he would say ‘we’re not going to say what’s on the page, and you don’t really have to either, try to keep up.’

The celebrity thing… I don’t want to sound as if I absolutely don’t want it because that’s not true. If you’re in the entertainment business, you have to be honest. There’s something alluring about it…