Ashton Sanders

To be able to inspire somebody just by doing something that you love, just by creating your art, is something that's very near and dear to my heart.

I'm acting! And doing it for income! But it's for something that I love, and that's super rare.

Despite everything that's going on, people need love.

For my career, I want to be able to do projects that have serious context to them or that make me grow as a person and an artist after the experience.

I would just encourage my younger self to not care about people's perceptions and to love myself fully and to keep progressing and striving for what you are going to become.

Moonlight' has changed my life externally but also internally... spiritually as well.

I wanna be Mahershala Ali in my next life. He's the man. He's a really genuine guy. He's a really great guy, one of my favorite people on this planet.

My whole life has changed so much, and it's still constantly changing, but 'Moonlight' brought about a bunch of opportunities that were really surreal, from the Oscars and Golden Globes to the notoriety that it brought, to even doing things like working with Calvin Klein.

I wasn't like the rest of the kids. I was an artist. Living in a black society, when you're raised around a bunch of boys who plays sports and chase girls, there's this perception of masculinity that's super hard to fit into. I wasn't the stereotype of that like a lot of my peers were.

I auditioned for 'Moonlight' without knowing anything. I went in the room, and I didn't know the lines as well as I should have. I didn't know a thing about the script. I wasn't told anything. I heard it was a low-budget film, and my agent told me to do it. I was super-ignorant to it.

I'd say my heart is more in independents, but sometimes these major films come along that are pretty good, you know?

A lot of these artists are out here don't stay true to why they started doing this in the first place.