Our identity is fictional, written by parents, relatives, education, society.
When you grow up on camera and in the public eye, you feel you have to put forth this image. I just took that to the extreme and there was a lot of pressure on me.
Identity is invariably false to facts.
I'm as vain as the next guy. I have a facade on right now. But you can't see it, because it's reality-based.
One forgets too easily the difference between a man and his image, and that there is none between the sound of his voice on the screen and in real life.
I had long ago become a creation, a public image made to be consumed, piled on top of a precarious shell of a little boy wanting to be loved.
It just feels unnatural to me to broadcast anything other than the character I've created.
You project a version of yourself to the public to protect and insulate yourself a little bit. Actors come up with a version of themselves in order to protect the real person.
Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction.
I'm not a prettier everywoman. I am an everywoman that they clean up awfully well for T.V.
The me you see on stage is largely a construct, based on me at my worst, my most annoying, my most petty, and my most patronizing.
When it comes to the British monarchy, I prefer to be seduced by an image than presented with a real person. It's kind of a Warhol thing.
When I sit down to talk to men's magazines, there's a certain character that I play. She's not fully fleshed out - she doesn't have her own name - but she shows up to do men's-magazine interviews.
I don't like the idea of having a public image. In the end, you have an image of someone, which becomes true whether it is or not.
My reputation is a media creation.
Now, I guess, people want stars. People are trying to invent stars.
I've been working as an actress since I was very young, and I know a lot of people who are actors who don't have to deal with having a persona... You know, if you look up the word persona, it isn't even real. The whole meaning of the word is that it's made up, and it's like I didn't even get to make up my own. It can be annoying.
Well, you create your own persona, don't you? And you have to live with that. But the people that I meet, they don't think that I'm a lunatic. And if they do, then that's OK, because it means that I'm playing the parts all right.
What you seem to find when you get into this biography business is that people tend to have an image of themselves that they want to project, and they want to color statements by this image.
We were little girls coming off of a TV show and had a team of people trying to sculpt us into something we weren't.
Donald Trump is perfectly made up. He's perfectly coiffed. He's perfectly lit.
We only exist in terms of how we think we exist. Meaning every cultural development is fabricated and can be fabricated.
When my first show was on MTV, and it was this outrageous persona, I think people certainly didn't know what to think. But it was a performance. I'm sure people didn't know that it was a performance; they thought maybe I was just nuts, but that was all intentional.
I've never been much for self-revelation. In two decades of public life, I always approached the limelight with extreme caution. Not that I kept my personal life off-limits; rather, the personal life I put on display was a blend of fact and fiction.
I'm trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.
