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" I'm not the most articulate person. "

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" I'm shy at public speaking, which is tough. "

" Some people say to me, 'You don't sound very Irish.' It's because I have this tendency to iron out my accent: not because I'm ashamed of it but because it makes my life easier if I don't keep having to repeat myself. "

" You know when you're a kid and you get to pick a movie every Friday? I watched everything. There's no particular genre that was appealing. I just loved the idea that you could dress up and play. "

" I'm all for philosophical debates about race, but if you look at history, you see that the status quo has power when it's unchallenged. So these conversations about inequality are crucial. "

" When I was a kid in Ireland, there were not very many black people. I was very much like the strange brown thing, intriguing and cute. I didn't experience racism there. The first time I did was in London. It was that moment that you realize you're black. A kind of lifting of the veil. "

" I am not hugely famous; I am not a name. For me, it's not the size of the role, it's the material and the people you are working with. "

" I've always been very talkative, very chatty, quite hyperactive. I grew up with a lot of cousins, and most of them were boys. Four in particular and I were the demolition squad. Havoc. "

" There are no actions involved in 'beautiful.' It's such an inactive thing, and it's so subject to each individual's taste and appreciation. It's a lovely word, but I feel like it's been hijacked by really boring, dull people who don't understand how to use words. "

" I become very territorial about my identity because it's been hijacked by so many people with their own projections. "

" I have not been aggressive in my pursuit of being a star. I've never had a plan. Maybe I need to be more aggressive, because it's quite tough! "

" I work best when there's a safety trampoline of kindness. "

" I'm interested in the idea that we all start off as these lovely little babies with all this potential but that circumstances mean that we don't always live the life we should. "

" I've gone into auditions, and I think they have an assumption about me when they see my photo, and then I open my mouth, and they say, 'Where exactly are you from? And you were born in Ethiopia? But you're Irish, but you also kind of sound English. That's really strange.' "

" I think if we don't understand history, if we don't keep referring back to it, we become complacent. And complacency, as we all know, it leads to repeating history. "

" I think a lot of actors feel like outsiders or miscreants. This profession provides an opportunity to play out all the different parts of ourselves. "

" Sometimes, people know me from Marvel's 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.' But that usually only happens in America. "

" History is written by the winners. My job as an artist is to speak up for those who might be perceived as the losers. Or those who can't shout. "

" I don't believe that directors need to essentially manipulate actors into doing things. You can suffer for your art, and you can make your own self suffer for your art. You don't need anyone else to do it for you. I work best when there's a safety trampoline of kindness. "

" I've met loads of black and brown and various people who are well into comics. "

" I didn't become an actor to make money. And I didn't become an actor to be famous - though people always gasp if you say that, as if it's unfathomable that an actor doesn't want to be a star. "

" Violence in film and television is an ongoing conversation, and I like eavesdropping on it, but I'm never sure what my opinion is. I like watching creative violence, but I don't know. "

" I had a very peripatetic childhood, so I bounced around. Lived in Ethiopia until I was, like, three or four and then lived between Ireland and London. "

" In many ways, playing a real person is slightly easier because you have a road map. When you're playing someone fictitious, there's myriad ways in. With a real person, there's boundaries, and that sometimes makes the work easier. "

" Ninety percent of my roles, I've had to fight for. It's only a really small percentage of people who get handed roles. "

" The idea that you must treat actors a certain way in order to get a performance out of them kind of disturbs me, and it's disregarding what we do. Our job is to do our job. "

" I didn't have that many black people in my life, so I had to sort of search them out. And I didn't grow up in America, but I identified as much with their writing about the black experience as I did with their writing about the human experience. "

" I don't like the term 'colour-blind' - because I don't want people to be blind to my colour. "

" I was an attention seeker, always in trouble. "

" I've always had sort of an interest in American history, full stop, and especially people who contributed to the civil rights struggle. "

" Often, it's easier to play someone further away from you because it's clearer who they are. I think if you want to make a performance authentic, there are a certain amount of leaps of faith into the unknown that you have to take. Otherwise, you're not really risking anything. "