I was an extremely fortunate young woman as an actor. I got a job at The Public Theater and I also landed a job on a soap opera. - Melissa Leo

The nuns that I grew up around in New York City, they were those activist nuns. They were the nuns who were shot in El Salvador, you know? They were the women who had chosen their own path and put their lives on the line in the only way they were allowed.

It’s a judgment about the character, and no, you can’t come into the character judging them as you’re playing them. That’s the film-maker’s job to choose the tone in which the character is seen.

I think being a female actor makes it more difficult in exactly the ways that any female on the planet finds the difficulty of our gender. There’s a huge misunderstanding about who we are and how we operate, a lot because of the way women are depicted in film and television.