Elle, Febuary 2000
“I was the talker of the group [in high school] and somehow I got the role of therapist among my friends. Who knows if that comes from being in a family where the parents were more like children than you were? You kind of want to take care of everyone, which can be a bad thing, trying to be a saviour for everyone. You kind of miss out on letting them take care of you.”
“It just felt really natural to me. A show about six people who hang out all the time. That makes perfect sense.”
“Kristin [Hahn]‘s the revolutionary pioneer woman. Andrea [Bendewald] is mom; I mean, Kris is literally mom, but Andrea really is mom. I don’t know what the hell I am. I’m kind of the carefree child that gets spanked once in a while. The one that gets wrangled in.”
“Oh my God, we were hard, very hard [to our friends' dates], and then, usually when there was a break-up, we’d get to unload. ‘I never liked him! Ever! I’m glad he’s gone!’”
“With each of us, well especially me, Kristin [Hahn] and Andrea [Bendewald] – our families are wonderful, but they definately weren’t easy. It was hard for them to understand these other people always being there – my mother especially. I know she puts my life down a lot. She didn’t understand how special and protective these people were. If only she knew, I think she would have felt less threatened and embraced them.”
“People always say, ‘Doesn’t it make you want one?’ Well, you always do. You sort of know if you are a person who wants to be a mother. I always did. Today, I was just awed that this was Kristin’s baby, holding him in my arms, I just burst into tears. It was a heavy cry too, I wasn’t quite sure what was happening. Very wild. Very wild.”
“I’m not the one who fantasised about ‘Where will I live? Who will I marry? Will I have babies?’ For the first time I’m really actually seeing those things, having visions and flashes of them. Hopefully [my girlfriends and I will] all be on some beautiful sprawling lawn, swinging on hammocks, watching our children play, up north, near San Francisco, on the coast. I’m getting closer to that point of not wanting to be immersed in Hollywood on a daily basis. I didn’t know that I would ever really say this, but I don’t know if I could ever raise a child in Los Angeles.”
“One of my favourite things is to sit and watch the sunset, take it all in. I’m very happy. Very lucky. You’ve got to pinch yourself once in a while.”
Elle, November 2000
“I’ve always had a secret, underlying love for heavy metal.”
“ELLE Style Awards? If the readers could see what I’m wearing today, they would just sit back and say, ‘Oh my God! What have we done?’”
“I said to myself after [filming Rock Star], ‘If I ever felt that I missed out on the wild side of life, I’ve done it now.’ Whoah. Heavy metal people – they live hard and they play hard, too.”
“Those awards shows are so surreal – fun but surreal.”
Vanity Fair, May 2001
“This has been the hardest year of my life, as well as the best year of my life. The period after the wedding was extremely intense, for a lot of reasons. This was the year where I took the deepest look inward that I ever had, and asked a lot of questions for the first time. There’s been a real internal overhaul – about family, work, everything. Marriage brings up all the things I pushed to the back burner – the fears, the mistrust, the doubts, the insecurities. It’s like opening Pandora’s box. Every question comes out – it’s like, Here’s the key, have at it!”
“I didn’t have a fantasy of what marriage would be like. I had no idea. I didn’t grow up surrounded by any form of marriage. I just knew I wanted it to be based in love – not money, not security. Just finding somebody who was your best friend, who you could grow with and enjoy the passage of time.”
“The only reason people should be together is to grow and to learn and to keep discovering and become better humans. And then – god forbid you fall short of those dreams, and you’re a failure.”
“I think I’m just starting to feel I can stop apologizing – to myself, to my family, to my friends, to the world – and live in my body and be O.K. with that.”
“If I’m so concerned with eliminating shame and low self-esteem and apologies in my own life, there’s also the thing about privacy: What do we have to hide? What do we have to be ashamed of? The bottom line is, I don’t want to live that way. It takes too much energy. Who cares?”
“I don’t feel like a role model – god, no, I’m a mess! I mean, I’m not a mess, but we’re all just trying to figure it out, to do the best we can.”
“I feel, half the time, like I am one of these teenage girls. Feeling stupid, feeling good enough, feeling adequate, asking, ‘What am I doing?’ – it doesn’t go away. Coming from a divorced family, being pissed off, being overweight…”
“There are young people who really hang on your words; they’re trying to live up to those ideals of you that are unreal, and there’s something so unfair about that. So when my friend said, ‘We’re doing this networking thing for young girls,’ I thought, Wouldn’t it be great if we could just sit around with these girls and just talk about it – to be honest, to tell the truth, and to empower them. I wasn’t empowered as a kid; I wasn’t encouraged. I was somehow filled with fear and doubt and insecurities. Being a celebrity now, if you can talk to one person and let them know it’s all bullshit, just be happy with who you are.”
“We’re victims of the media, too. It’s a double-edge sword. You’ve got to promote and sell your work, and yet the media are so harmful. The beauty magazines particularly are there to feed on women’s low self-esteem. The truth is we’re all the same; there’s nothing greater about celebrities. It’s just a job. The media create this wonderful illusion – but the amount of airbrushing that goes into these beauty magazines, the hours of hair and make-up! It’s impossible to live up to, because it’s not real. But it’s a big job, extinguishing the shame we all have.”
“They’ll make fun of you if you’re too fat and then tear you down if you’re too thin. You just can’t win. I am so thankful for this life, and – not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I don’t feel beautiful all the time. The majority of the time I don’t.”
“To get rid of that piece-of-shit feeling we carry in ourselves. Getting the success – you feel, Why me? I went through a period of guilt about my family: ‘Why are they struggling, and why did it work for me? I don’t deserve this! When are they going to find me out and call me on my bluff?’ And yet all that kid stuff had given me a career. I’ve channeled it into something positive – being able to make people laugh.”
“As an adult, how do you not forgive somebody who says he’s sorry?”
“I can’t believe I got married and my mother has never met this person I married. I never would have believed it, when I was 17, if you had told me that would happen. It was a torturous decision [to not invite my mother to my wedding].”
“That’s the irony – my father and I are friends, and my mother and I don’t speak. It’s a bummer. I miss her. You want to just share it. But I think this is just a necessary break we need to take. Let it heal. This is my last chunk of disease – dis-ease – in my life – my mom. I’m still trying to understand those years of my life, and figure out what’s real. As an adult, I can’t blame my parents anymore. At this point we are accountable for our actions. We can change things.”
“I can’t imagine not acting, but I’ve been asking these crazy questions. I’ve had dreams of owning an antique store or owning a restaurant. I fell into acting because it was all I thought I could do. You’re funny as a kid, you’re the goofball, the class clown – but now you’ve kind of done it, and you realize, Was this what I really wanted to do? Part of me would love to be on the more creative side. I love dissecting a script, figuring out how to make it better, and even – dare I say it – directing. I think next year I might take a crack at it on Friends. David Schwimmer has done a bunch of them, and it was really inspiring. There’s no reason I couldn’t try that.”
“Acting is so much fun I don’t think I could ever give it up completely. There are so many things I haven’t explored yet as an actor, things that scare me, that I have to tackle.”
“I’ve come to the realization that I want to work to live; I don’t want to live to work. I feel like there’s so much to do in life, but I don’t know what it is. You can dream as big as you want. I guess you don’t know how far you can go until you try. But no job is as important to me as my love. There will always be another job – and if there’s not, there will be something else.”
“I look at life like rock climbing. You get through the first tier, you rest for a minute, you look back at how far you’ve come – and then you look up, and you’ve got another tier to climb.”