Quotes About Diversity

I love being the character actor. I get to stretch my muscles a little more.

I like to stretch myself and push the envelope, so anything that's new or different or not of my daily routine, I am so for.

Fantasy is, of course, booming, and I think it's beginning to stretch its range as well.

It's no stretch to picture me standing next to Al Pacino or Robert De Niro. Those are ethnic New York men. I'm an ethnic New York girl. Everybody has their limitations. I mean, I should never be cast as Queen Elizabeth.

On nights that I'm feeling a need to stretch personally and artistically, I tend to put together outfits that are very quirky, mismatched and over-the-top eclectic.

I think every album you have to stretch further and further, give people another piece of you. But then I always try to deviate from the norm.

Sometimes in film and television, I don't have the opportunity to play roles that really stretch and challenge me.

I wanted 'The South Bank Show' to reflect my own life and that of the team around me; to stretch the accepted boundaries and challenge the accepted hierarchies of the arts; to include pop music as well as classical music, television drama as well as theatre drama, and high-definition performers in comedy.

I'm trying to break the stereotypical role now of the Theo-type character because, in my post-'Cosby' life, as I call it, I don't want to be known as just the kind of guy who can play a Theo Huxtable-type character. I want to be known as being able to do more things, being able to stretch.

I feel like if Hollywood can stretch for inclusion and intersectionality, and being intentional with its intersectionality, that that can ripple out past Hollywood into whatever industry and kind of affect society as a whole.

I have a lot of talent and sometimes, you know, when people see you're a drag queen they go, 'Oh, he's a drag queen. That's what he does.' But I'm always excited to... stretch the boundaries on how they see me.

I feel the same way about Shondaland I feel about Africa and Greece. I feel pretty in both places. Men look at me like I'm a novelty, and women think I'm just cool. I feel absolutely at home immediately. I'm not altering myself to fit in. I'm walking in just as I am. And there are open arms stretched out to greet me.

And there's a lot of that stuff with people bringing their kids, kids bringing their parents, people bringing their grandparents - I mean, it's gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographics of our audience.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

I think knowing where you can generally fit is important, but the fun thing about being an actor is sometimes stretching beyond that stereotype and stretching beyond the box that people put you in.

I think that people have a very strict perception of what a pop artist is.

While the books I read as a child lacked diversity in the strict sense, they didn't lack values. Reading, I didn't see me externally, but I felt me - my humanity.

Parents with a West Indian background tend to be more strict.

We have an older following with 'Hairy Bikers,' but 'Strictly' crosses all generations.

I've always presented as a very cisgender male and that was part of the reason I was able to cover so easily... I was always in such a strictly binary environment growing up. I was never given an opportunity to sort of play into more genderqueer fashion.

When I joined the 'Strictly Come Dancing' panel in 2009, the controller of the BBC came into my dressing room and said they were proud to have a woman of colour on their panel. It was so nice that they acknowledged it.

There are kids out there that are into Iron Maiden and others who are strictly into industrial music, but they come for the same reason; they all like us and they different things out of the band's music.

One of the reasons I said yes to doing 'Strictly' was because it is so far removed from what I do for a living ordinarily.

I had three brilliant years on 'The X Factor,' and it was one of the best jobs I've ever had. 'Strictly' is completely different; it's a whole different show - I'm dancing. It's not presenting. But this is one of the best things I've done - ever.