What I needed to do was carve out parts for me, roles for me that weren't just the sidekick, where I got to be the lead, because that's breaking through.
I'm not Drake's sidekick.
Quite often in comic book movies, very good actresses are relegated to being the girlfriend or the helper or the sidekick or something.
We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.
I'm Angelina Jolie's sidekick in 'Maleficent'. It's cool.
The sidekick business has been good to me.
I have a sidekick, Keith Robinson, who's very funny. I've known Keith for over 20 years; he's my best friend.
I remember my agent at ICM at the beginning of my career telling me that I wasn't pretty enough, that I was always going to be a quirky sidekick. And he was an ogre of a man. He should have been carrying a torch. If he was in a bar, he couldn't have come near me, and then he was deciding my fate.
TV deals in very broad strokes. Like, 'Oh, that's my dumb friend', or, 'That's my funny friend.' A true best friend, a sidekick, has to be a little deeper then that. You have to feel like there's nothing either character won't do. That someone really, really has their back.
I now understand how varied the world of cultivated rice is; that rice can play the lead or be a sidekick; that brown rice is as valuable as white; and that short-grain rice is the bee's knees.
