People will become your enemies if you become eminent too quickly in life, and you will be ineffectual. Rising slowly in the world, people will be your supporters and your happiness will be assured.
My life is fairly normal. I didn't wake up one morning and find out that I'm suddenly a star, with people clamoring at me. I feel like I'm moving up the ladder just a little, which is fine.
I think it's a great handicap to be discovered at an early age. I didn't have that burden of early success. I had the much more livable and durable career where success comes late, and comes slowly, and you ease into it. So by the time it comes, you're ready to deal with it.
Fame didn't happen to me in my 20s, it has been a gradual thing which probably makes it easier to deal with.
People got to know me very gradually. It was little things. It's still like that. 'That Thing you Do!' was a big thing. It's always been very gradual. Like I say, people still ask me if I'm still acting. 'I've seen all your movies. What are you doing now?' Ha ha!
But, a lot of people thought that I came into AEW to go right into the main event and right to the top of the mountain and get all the titles thrown on you and push, push, push, push. Not the case, exactly.
Celebrity status for me came slowly. I wasn't an overnight sensation. I had time to prepare emotionally.
No, I'm not angling for huge fame. My career has been a very slow, arduous climb to the middle.
I have been acting for over 20 years and I started in the smallest little theater that you can possibly imagine and then I very slowly built myself to this point. So it is never like there is this real sharp change or something that really startled me. It has just been very gradual.
I didn't get into entertainment until I was like 31. I didn't star in a movie until I was 46.
You know what's been interesting about my career? It's been this slow rise with long plateaus.
To be honest, unless you rocket straight to stardom as a gorgeous young vampire, you can spend a lot of time working behind a bar.
For me, acting is a long-term thing. I'm not in a hurry to make it. I have no desire to explode onto the film industry. I still want to be acting when I'm 60.
The thing that is cool about my come up is that I dealt with fame and having money gradually. It didn't happen overnight. It was something that took a while to happen. It was something that humbled me and made me very appreciative of my blessings more than I would have been if it had happened faster and easier.
I was never the person who came up with a boom somehow. I worked slowly and consistently, making my way up the rankings, so there wasn't one special moment.
I know it wasn't like a meteoric rise, it was not overnight success. Nobody watched my movie, fell in love and said 'I'm her biggest fan.' People took time to warm up to me.
I think it's important to earn your fan base and not just try to immediately advance to the top. If you ride to the top quickly, you're liable to fall as quickly. Take your time. It's a long journey ahead of you as an artist. There's nowhere that you're supposed to be other than right now living inside of your art.
Somehow over the years people have gotten the impression that Wal-Mart was...just this great idea that turned into an overnight success. But...it was an outgrowth of everything we'd been doing since [1945]...And like most overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.
If you look at the careers of Philip Seymour Hoffmann, Paul Giamatti, Meryl Streep, none of them shot up in terms of fame or fortune or recognition, they laid a platform of good, solid work and became better and better.
