Quotes from Laurie Metcalf

I watch the Oscars in my pajamas like everybody else.

I'm not trying to blow out a camera lens or make the audience's hair go straight back from my sheer volume, sheer energy level.

I want to be thinking as quickly as I need to as soon as I hit the stage. I want to have a vocal warm-up.

I don't like working in front of a camera.

I've been directed by other actors, and being an actor doesn't make you a good director.

I am a kind of competitive person. I am competitive with myself. I won't let anything go until I am satisfied with how it is.

I like contemporary, bare-boned writing. I don't like having the language that I barely understand get in the way of me interpreting it over to an audience. It's this barrier that I don't want to have to attack.

I can't even call it work. I'm a creative-a-holic. I love the tearing into new material.

I like to play a wide range of characters. The more they're unlike me, the better I like it.

I've loved every minute of every hour I've spent doing theatre.

I tend to root for characters who have a lot of negative qualities, but what's driving them forward is their passion. They're on a mission, and maybe their approach is misguided, but you can't fault them for giving 150%.

I had accidentally gotten a laugh on a line in a play I was in during high school. I got hooked, but I had no idea I would ever be able to support myself by acting. I knew no one in the business. I was from the Midwest. No one within a radius of a thousand miles was doing anything like that.

I'm incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to bring Mae to work with me as I take on the guest role of 'Mary McGowan.'

I'm so thrilled to be here on the set of 'Supergirl!'

That was the beauty of 'Roseanne' and Roseanne herself. It could go dark; it could do issues.

I work just as hard and have just as much fun whether in a 50-seat house or in a 1000-seat house. It's a luxury to be in a tiny space every once in a while and a rush to be on a giant stage every once in a while.

I gravitated back to theatre again, and when I heard about this little independent movie called 'Lady Bird,' I thought, 'This will be a project where I can dip my toe back into the water.'

Really, I'll go anywhere at any time to continue working in theater - it's a passion that I'm thankful I still have. It keeps me creative and on my toes and meeting great people. I can't imagine a better way of working than on a play.

I was an office secretary for a long time. A good secretary.

I'm happy whenever I'm in a rehearsal room. I've always gotten all my energy and creativity in there.

I don't like the camera. I get very self-conscious with it and then spend way too much time not looking self-conscious instead of being free, as I do on stage, to do my work.

Onstage I'm the one in control - I'm not at the mercy of how an editor chooses to put the scene together later. I can do things onstage that I would never do in real life. It's very freeing.

I'm hideously shy as myself, but on stage I can run around naked and bite the heads off fish.

I was always a secretary in the early days, before we decided we were brave enough to join Equity and see if this thing has any legs.