Quotes

ON LIFE & CHILDHOOD

As soon as I left high school I cut my ties with everyone I knew and took off to a new city and I started again. I moved [between] towns in British Columbia. I remember saying to myself when I got to this new town, ‘You can be anyone you want to be now. Nobody knows you. Nobody has an expectation of you. So you choose who you want to be’.

I used to be afraid of the water so I took lessons, and now I really love the ocean. It’s so warm and peaceful and welcoming. Now, every day that I’m not in the ocean is incomplete.

Ever since high school I had done things so people wouldn’t just respect me because of the way I looked. I decided, to hell with it. I’m going to pursue mediocrity, and I’m going to be so happy.

For ages I didn’t want to be noticed. Then I decided to assert myself by going to auditions.I use neutrogena hand cream up my nose on a plane to prevent myself from getting sick.

I come across a man who I’m really attracted to about once every five years.

I love being outside–that’s where I’m the happiest!I love style and dressing up, but I’ve also got competitive testosterone and I’m incredibly stubborn. When I’m going for a jog and I come up behind a guy on his bike, I try to beat him, even if it kills me.

I loved being a waitress. At times I think… I’d just like to go back and be a waitress for a few weeks and just have fun serving tables again.

I need alone time like I need air.

I never would have guessed Hawaii or Hollywood would be able to provide me with one of my dreams.

I remember moving out of my small town that I lived in in Canada because I felt like too many people knew me after living there for 12 years. I up and left because I was like this is just weird. I walk down the street and people know me. To go somewhere where I was unknown. And I’ve done that pretty much every six months ever since then until I got Lost.

I seem to date these really metrosexual men who always know less about cars than I do!

I still have a family who adore me. I still have friends I count on back home, and I still have brown hair. Other than that…I tend to appreciate the tiny moments and they make me the happiest.

ON BEAUTY, FASHION & HEALTH

I am kind of prudish and I have very strict standards about how I present myself. But one of the things that I’ve always stood by is that women are beautiful and sexy. We shouldn’t be afraid of that. [But] we need to make sure that we present that beauty and that sexiness in a way that says we are in control of our bodies. We’re strong, we’re classy, we’re beautiful, powerful beings to be reckoned with, not victims.

I come from a family of women with big thighs. So be it!

I cried myself to sleep wishing I was ugly because men leered and disrespected me, because they assumed things about my mental capacity or my physical willingness based on the way I look.Even if you’re unhappy, just pretend that you’re happy. Eventually, your smile will be contagious to yourself. I had to learn that, I used to think, ‘I’m being fake,’ but you know what? Better to be fake and happy than real and miserable.

ON CAREER & FAME

At one time, I worked five jobs at once while going to school full-time and it still doesn’t compare to what I’m doing right now.

Being a Christian doesn’t sit well in this industry. I don’t mind kissing scenes if they’re telling the story, but I won’t do them if they’re gratuitous.

Being the hot star isn’t the dream. But I can do more humanitarian work and effect more people on a larger scale. Not necessarily because I’m famous but just because, financially, I’m more capable and I have more influence. It’s an amazing place to be in.

Hollywood is the Sodom and Gomorrah of today. It’s a world I avoid because it’s destroying our culture.Now I feel that I’m more capable of doing humanitarian work because I’m financially able to make a difference. You have to sacrifice something to get something. For me, fame is that sacrifice, because I never wanted it, and I still don’t. It’s something I have to live with.

I am an incredibly private person, and it’s so exhausting to me that everywhere I go people know me or think they know me. If I could act and make the income I make and be anonymous, I would never want to leave the job.

I avoided the industry for so long because I resent it for so many reasons. There was no way that my ideas about life and morality were going to coincide with that industry, so there was no point in even playing with fire.

I love it. I LOVE it! I love acting, being paid to be creative. I’ve always been really passionate about the arts. But I also constantly yo-yo between wanting to do this for a long time, wanting to achieve a certain level of respect in this industry, and then at the other end of the scale wanting to run for the hills screaming “this is terrifying and I want out.”

I really don’t want to be mysterious. Women in this business are expected to put forth a poised and perfect persona. I want people to see that I’m an ordinary-Joe girl. I blow my nose after work, I drool in my sleep and my shit stinks.

I think that being isolated from the Hollywood world of premieres and red carpet events was probably good for me because I could ease into those at will and by my own choice. But in other aspects, when it comes to fanfare Hawaii is nuts and in L.A. they’re all so jaded. They don’t care. They see another star and it’s like, ‘oh yeah, we’ve seen a hundred of them before. You’re a dime a dozen’. Which is a little bit easier to deal with.I feel like I’m in boot camp. On Lost – my first year was baptism by fire. I just was thrown in. And I had no idea what I was doing, not just on set, and not just as an actor, but as a public figure. I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea how to cope with it, and what the best ways were to manage it. I’m constantly learning that and therefore, in learning it, I knew I didn’t want to – one of the first things I knew was, I don’t want to have this beast become so big and uncontrollable that I am swallowed up by it.

To put it simply – you know, a lot of people believe that the benefit of this job is fame and fortune. I believe that you pay for the fortune through the fame. I don’t buy into the notion that being famous is somehow a good thing, or an exciting thing, or a wonderful thing. I think it’s more cumbersome and more of a hindrance to your life than it is the other. But the fortune is fantastic. I’ll take it, and I have no complaints. But it’s not – you know, I didn’t become an actress because I wanted to be famous. I didn’t become an actress because this is the ultimate career goal of my life. I became an actress by accident. I was doing a psychological exercise with myself, challenging myself, by going to auditions. I had no idea that it would connect to a job. I had no intention for it to connect to a job. I was doing it as an exercise. So when I got a job, I, in that moment, had to sit down and go, “Do I want to be an actor?”.

To his defence, Tolkien was writing in 1937. The world is a different place today. I kept repeatedly telling people that in this day and age, to put nine hours of cinema entertainment in theatres for young girls to go and watch, and not have one female character – it’s subliminally telling them that ‘You don’t matter, you’re not important and you’re not pivotal to the story’. I think that they were very brave and very right in saying ‘We won’t do that to the young female audience that will come and watch our films’. And even for women my own age, I think it’s time that we stop making stories that are only about men. I love that they make Tauriel a hero.

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