I like to hide behind the characters I play. Despite the public perception, I am a very private person who has a hard time with the fame thing.

I just stay healthy all year round. I try to feel good in my skin. For me, I have trained in ballet my whole life so my body really feels best when I feel strong and tight and toned, and I think that comes from years and years of constant training as a ballerina. Leading up to the show, getting out there in your underwear, you just want to feel your best mainly in your head than more anything else. Obviously you want to feel good physically too, so it's more just in your head, pushing yourself, approaching this challenge and taking the opportunity to push yourself a little further.

I think I was probably able to flip characters in my head as if I was playing different roles in order to write the different people because you kind of have to be one person, and inhabit him and write from his voice and be her and write her voice. So I think that helped.

Some people go shopping - I cut myself.

Our family may seem extraordinary in some magazines or something, but at home it's not. We're really just a very loving family. We're very close, and we don't read magazines. We just kind of go to work and come home. We try to keep a sense of reality into their lives. What's truly real, not Hollywood real.

Yeah, but before anything, I think in 6 years somehow I've grown up to have a beautiful home, 2 beautiful stepchildren, a beautiful husband, my family is healthy and happy. I'm financially ok and I do what I love for a living. That's what I think, and I think god, how did I get so lucky.

I think I connect to people who could be written off as wild or dark, or who are just full of fire and looking for a place to put that fire. It's an important lesson to learn, and it's something I did learn: you live on behalf of others and you're happier and you have purpose. And you have a great excuse to have all that fire.