MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: You often find yourself in situations where you have to put on a front, where you have to put on a happy face even if you are frustrated or annoyed. I think actors are in those situations all the time because you are constantly being put in situations where you have to be smiling. If you are not happy that day, you have to be nice to everyone around you if you want to get ahead. I am a fairly happy person in general, so that comes pretty easily to me.

MEAGAN GOOD: Life is mostly positive for me. There are negative things that happen, but they don’t happen on set. Just recently the paparazzi got a hold of a photo of Jamie Foxx smacking me one on the lips and it totally got blown out of proportion. I’ve known Jamie for years, probably since I was 18 and that got blown way out of proportion. [Dealing with] the whole rumor mill and the drama, you’re just like, "Fuck, this is my life and I have to deal with it." The paparazzi pulled up on-point, the second we walked out of the hotel. We were both in the lobby and saying hello and good-bye and it was totally random. I almost felt set up in a weird way.

LAUREN BITTNER: My boyfriend and I were watching Letterman one night and [my co-star in The Thing About My Folks] Paul Reiser was on. Paul started to talk, and then Letterman said, "Let’s show clips." Then all of a sudden, I see myself bounce onto the screen, and bend over. And all I was thinking was, "Please don’t let Letterman say anything about my ass, please!" I don’t think I’m too anxious to bend over anymore, and have my ass be the focal point of the shot.

MEAGAN GOOD: I think I’m amused by [the situation with Jamie Foxx] right now. I wasn’t upset by the picture. As a woman, your life should be private and you should try to keep it that way. I know that’s sometimes hard, especially being in this industry, but I don’t really want to be seen with someone unless that’s my man, or my boyfriend or my husband. Anything outside of that makes it easy for people to make assumptions. In the grand scheme of things though, it is amusing. I’m like, "Ehhh."

TINA MAJORINO: A lot of the time being a woman in the business is about what’s hot right now. If it’s really in to have hips and you don’t have hips, then you are not hot enough. They have no problem telling you that or that you need to lose 10 pounds or that you’d be a lot hotter or prettier if you lost some weight or that your ears are too big. I’ve never been told that my ears are too big, but I have been told that I need to be skinnier. It’s always a matter of being skinnier. If you go out for [TV shows in particular], there’s a cookie cutter image that they are looking for and if you don’t fit it, they definitely don’t have a problem telling you. That’s hard to deal with every day because I think in general everyone has their self-esteem issues and their bad days when they don’t feel that they look good. If you go into an audition and have someone tell you that you don’t, that’s kind of heartbreaking.

NORA ZEHETNER: Sometimes you stumble across a mean message board while looking for other things on line. "What is she thinking wearing this dress? Who is she?" I try not to look! That’s not to say that I don’t ever, or haven’t ever, but it’s best not to look. If you’re feeling fragile, it makes you want to cry.

TINA MAJORINO: I’m never really tempted to conform because even though I want to work and I want to be successful, I still have to live with myself every day when I’m not on a set or doing an audition. I’m just not into conforming to make everyone else happy. You either get me or you don’t. If you don’t, that’s cool and I’ll move on to the next person who will. I feel that the whole image thing in Hollywood is so fickle anyway that the next minute it could be something else. As soon as you conform to become what’s hot right now, that changes and then you are screwed.

LAURA RAMSEY: I’ve definitely heard about the casting couch, but you’ve got to work to get where you want to go, in any case, in any job. You have to work and I would feel like a miserable, miserable, lost soul if I ever considered doing that. I feel so sorry for the girls that do that because it’s not going to get them anywhere, they never end up getting the job anyway. There are those guys everywhere, cheating on their wives, and all that stuff. L.A. is like a devil town. You know what my word is? My family and everyone knows, it’s "grim." My production company is even called Grim Entertainment.

HAYLIE DUFF: A lot of times it’s hard to find really great roles because they automatically associate me with Hilary [Duff] or they see me as the Haylie Duff who is on Seventh Heaven. Seventh Heaven is not an edgy show. Napoleon Dynamite is not that edgy of a project. It was a great movie, but it wasn’t one of these things where everyone is taking their clothes off. It’s kind of hard to break that sometimes. People also often think that I am a lot younger than I am. Everyone who meets me is like, "Oh, are you the youngest Duff sister?" "No, I’m two and a half years older than Hilary."

JENNIFER HALL: There are times where everything seems so reliant upon luck. I had a meeting with the vice president of casting with Universal Pictures yesterday and we had this great meeting and then afterwards she said, "Hmm, let me think about the projects we have going on: nope, nope, nope, nope. Sorry, we’re not working on anything that you’re right for." So, I get into this great office, I have a great meeting, it goes really, really well, they want to work with me and there’s absolutely nothing that they’re doing that I’m right for.

HAYLIE DUFF: There can be a role that you can act the hell out of and because the casting directors might have some previously set opinion of who you are or what you are, it makes it hard for them to see you as anything else. In my real life, I’m very normal and I’m not this girl who is running around with every man and doing drugs. A lot of times when casting directors see someone who is like that, it’s hard for them to see her as anything else. They see me as a good normal girl. It’s hard for them to picture me playing someone who is not like that.

NORA ZEHETNER: Right now, my hair is really short. If my hair is really short, I think people have a hard time imagining me with long hair. I’m like, "I can put in extensions or dye my hair." They don’t see that though. Some people have a little bit more vision the more your career progresses. It’s not like there’s a Nora Zehetner type–well there is, but nobody needs a Nora Zehetner type yet.

TINA MAJORINO: One of the hardest thing about being an actress comes when you are choosing projects: you don’t want to commit to any project that’s going to type-cast you in any way. So even if you are intrigued by a certain character in one of those G.D. teen movies, that’s part of the decision: do I really want to step into that genre? And what if I get stuck? After I did Napoleon Dynamite, I went into casting sessions and they’d all think that I am really nerdy and that I really wear side ponytails. I think that’s just human nature that you see somebody in one aspect and it’s kind of hard to imagine them in a different one. You’d think that casting directors wouldn’t do that, but most of the time they do. Sometimes you want to smack them and say, "No, that’s not who I am."

TIFFANY DUPONT: It gets more difficult when people start to know you with a certain look. For example, I played a character who is very polished and put together. She’s pretty, that kind of good, clean cut girl. That’s great, but if I want to play something else, I have to convince them to see me that way. You can give one sentence to fifty different girls and they’re all going to be completely different readings of that one sentence. At that point, it’s going to be about those producers who know exactly what they want and one of those girls is that. It’s just that simple. You can’t really start going crazy [thinking] about, "I can do that, I’m an actress, I can dye my hair." If you’re right, you’re right, and you’ll get it. There’s no rhyme or reason in this business, you have to know that before you start. I realized that really early in the business, and maybe that’s part of my sane outlook.

JENNIFER HALL: I just played a really mousy, codependent character. Parts of it are instinctual; some of it comes right out of my own personality. It’s scary to just open yourself up and you find that you do have so much in common with this character that you think you can never relate to.

MEAGAN GOOD: I think [being African-American] makes it harder for me to get outside the box. A lot of the roles that are offered to me are shoot-’em-up-bang-bang roles or in stuff like The Cookout. It’s very hard to get someone to look at you initially. When they have a script and they’re looking for a young girl, whose 20 and who has a miscarriage, gets married and goes through all these things, they immediately think of Scarlett Johansson. They never think that this girl might be a young black girl or Latino girl. It’s kind of a struggle and a fight to get outside the box and be viewed as a human being instead of, "Who’s going to be the token black girl in this movie," or "Who is going to be Scarlett Johansson's best friend?" In that way it can be kind of frustrating and it can hold you back a little bit, but I’m very proud of who I am and am going to do what I’m going to do regardless.

TINA MAJORINO: I’ll look at anything with a good role. The exciting thing for me with a project is the prospect of being challenged in some sort of way. I think that would be an exciting turn of events. That’s what I look for each day when I’m looking to do a project. Whether it’s a big budget project or whether it’s a low budget project, it doesn’t really matter on what scale it is to me if it’s got good character fibers.

MEAGAN GOOD: For now, I’ve put the role of the ‘hot girl’ to bed. I don’t mind doing it, but I’m in a space right now where I don’t want to be pigeon-holed in that forever. I don’t want to be stuck as ‘the hot girl’.

LAURA RAMSEY: My ideal role would be to play a character who is natural and who doesn’t wear makeup. Something like Monster, with Charlize Theron. I’d love to change my look, lose a lot of weight and play a drug addict or get bigger. I go out for these things that are like the beautiful hot girl, the popular hot girl and what I would like to do is dye my hair or get piercings. The trouble is that I’ve actually heard that the casting directors think I’m too pretty for a role. I don’t want to sound conceited, but I tested for a movie that just did really well and they wanted to have someone with brown hair and who wasn’t [that good looking]. That is really depressing.