Mira Sorvino

Actress

Sorvino won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in Woody Allen's 1995 Mighty Aphrodite.

In an August 1997 interview in GQ, Sorvino was extremely candid about her lack of religious belief: "When you are a Christian, your law is laid our for you in codified form. You can have some kind of debate about this or that, but basically you're supposed to accept God's will. There is no argument about whether there is a definitive right and wrong. And once you know this law, nobody else can be right unless they agree with you. And so you wind up with, 'You are wrong. You are mistaken. You are sinning. You are in error.' I find that extremely restrictive and impossible... Think, just think, about how every last man and woman and child of the Pharisees was killed for their blasphemy and their infidelity when their greatest crime was they were mistaken. So they believed in the wrong God--they should be killed for this? Is this justice? Is it?" When the interviewer challenged her about her beliefs, Sorvino replied, "No, this is not what a fair God would do. And why does it not say anywhere in the Bible that slavery is wrong? It only says that you should treat your slaves well. Well, I don't care if you treat them well. How is it possible that it is not immoral to own another person? Why isn't that one of the Ten Commandments? 'Thou shalt not own another person.' You want to sit here and tell me that fornication is worse than owning someone?"

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According to an interview in the August 15-17, 1997 issue of USA Weekend, when Sorvino was little girl, she was horrified after learning about the genocide perpetrated by Idi Amin in Uganda in the 1970s. When USA Weekend asked about her reaction to these horrors, Sorvino said, "I couldn't believe a conscientious God would let so many people get killed. These things blew my mind. In a way, I couldn't understand the world."

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Editor's Note: due to numerous reports of Sorvino wearing a crucifix necklace I've moved her to the ambiguous category.