When you work for the Coens, they are so fun and so organized. They treat everyone with such respect. And the character I got to play was so fun.

Even when Warren [Beatty] cast me, it had been two years between films at that point.

I auditioned for four or five years and didn't get anything after that.

I buy myself a present whenever I don't get a role that I really wanted.

Warren [Beatty] did a very cool thing, where he directs in character.

You need those people to also have power and authority, and in a way that has been the story of my career.

[The Yellow Birds] is based on a novel written by Kevin Powers, who is an Iraq War vet. I play a soldier who promises my friend's mother I'm going to keep him alive. But when we go overseas to Iraq, he gets killed. It's about what happened to him, my reckoning and dealing with that as I return home from the war.