I love to cook comfort food. I’ll make fish and vegetables or meat and vegetables and potatoes or rice. The ritual of it is fun for me, and the creativity of it.
[On husband Ryan Phillippe] I don’t think I can imagine a better guy than the one I’ve ended up with.
Many people worry so much about managing their careers, but rarely spend half that much energy managing their lives. I want to make my life, not just my job, the best it can be. The rest will work itself out.
Even people that know Johnny Cash’s music really well and know that he was married don’t really know that much about June Carter. So finding out about her really helped to inform my performance and to bring her to the front in a way that she has never been before.
Confidence is everything in this business.
I grew up in Tennessee. We didn’t know what Louis Vuitton was. I had to order all my prom outfits out of catalogs.
I feel there are certain people who are systematically ripping (feminism) down because of their lack of regard and their ignorance about what the women before us had to go through.
I get crazy in a bookstore. It makes my heart beat hard because I want to buy everything.
[On asserting herself] They want people they can push around. I was the girl who was always asking, “Why? Yeah, I know you want me to do that – but why?” I always thought people wanted to hear my opinions. (Grins) But I gave them anyway. It’s just blind self-confidence. I get like a little terrier about things. My mother says I should have been an attorney.
I’m not perfect! I’m human. I make mistakes. But I try to be as conscious as I can about things I should be. If I’m going to do something commercial and mainstream and made for the masses, I just believe you can make those kinds of films with quality – and good ideas and good intentions. There’s a lot of negativity out there.
To play June, I had an immediate connect with her background and culture. We grew up with the same religion and shared a lot of the same values of family and spirituality. But I was really so inspired by what a modern woman she was.
I feel like there’s a race being run in Los Angeles for some unattainable goal – to be the best, the skinniest, the most beautiful. I just admit that that’s what I’ll never be.
I do think things were meant to happen. I’m just this little girl from Tennessee, and here I am today. I think a lot of things are just out of your hands.
And you know, life is a constant learning experience. I learn so much with my kids. I read tons of books and study what they’re studying.
I don’t believe in perfection. I don’t think there is such a thing. But the energy of wanting things to be great is a perfectionist energy.
[On being criticized after admitting she and then-husband Ryan Phillippe have gone to couples therapy] Since when is self-improvement a negative? Why wouldn’t I be interested in psychology? I like to read a lot of psychology books. I’m obsessed with child behavior; I would love to be a child psychologist.
I take the kids to church and Sunday school. They love it. I really think it’s important for a child to feel that there are things that are bigger than your life out there.
Being a Southern person and a blonde, it’s not a good combination. Immediately, when people meet you, they think of you as not being smart.
But with the right kind of coaching and determination you can accomplish anything and the biggest accomplishment that I feel I got from the film was overcoming that fear.
Ryan and I didn’t grow up like this at all, with this much attention. We’ll just try to keep their feet on the ground and raise them with the values we were raised with.
I started working on trying to sound like June from the very beginning.
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