Once the audience has to use themselves to cross the distance to the character, that's what's really exciting. That's when it starts to be a discussion between the art form and the audience, and that's fun stuff.

Like all kids who want to be in action movies, I want to jump out of a speeding car, shoot guns, slide out the side in slow motion like a John Woo movie.

There's this notion that actors choose their career. After a certain level, I think that that's true. I still take way more jobs than I turn down, and the reason that I turn down a job is that I just can't find anything in it that charges me or excites me or challenges me about moving to the next phase of where I'm headed.

It can be annoying not to know who you are, where you came from, or what you're doing. To try to create a character without a whole lot of information can be taxing.

Once the audience has to use themselves to cross the distance to the character, that's what's really exciting. That's when it starts to be a discussion between the art form and the audience, and that's fun stuff.

Luckily, what you trade off in not being part of the comic book canon and not having some literature that you can use to your benefit, in terms of figuring out who you are, you gain in the ability to just be whoever you want to be.

I'm attracted to good writing. When I read the page and I know what we're after and where we're headed, and I'm fortunate enough to respect that idea and am able to pitch myself toward that, that feels like the culmination of everything that I've spent my life trying to do, since I played that tree in that play in third grade.