Quotes from Sarita Choudhury

I live in New York, so I don't get that many Indian scripts.

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

I don't think of the characters as nationalities. I do not live in India. Playing people from different backgrounds, including Indians, comes easily to me.

My early acting was ingenue stuff.

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.

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.

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.

I have always loved doing accents. I have lived with my parents in a number of countries, including Italy and Jamaica.

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!

I love theatre because of the audience. It feels risky. But I love film because it travels to the whole world. To an audience I don't see.

The conventional Indian movie industry is not for me: I cannot dance around trees or the water-fountain.

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

For me, what is important is to bring the inner life of these characters - their strengths, contradictions, anguish and triumph - alive.

When you do TV, people will say to you right on the street how they're feeling, with no reservations.

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

People have this impression that once you move to America, that becomes your interest. But I never moved to Los Angeles; I stayed in New York because I do theatre, so my aim is not just Hollywood.

My parents are really open-minded, but with their own daughter, it's not the same thing.

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.

Left to myself, I would only play an Indian. But the reality was that there were hardly any Indian characters I could play in the films made in England and Hollywood. So I had to learn how to disappear into a variety of characters.

If a filmmaker is making a movie about a nice Midwestern family or a story that needs a very white character or a black or a Chinese, then I don't expect to go up for it. But I know, especially in places like New York, there's no excuse not to see various colors.

I want my life to match my work now. I don't want to work and then travel. I want to be at one place.