I had no idea I was hot. I was just like, "Oh, this is normal. You make two movies a year. This is easy." And of course, I have since learned that acting has its periods of unemployment, and ups and downs. The first five years were really good to me.

I wish that I had gotten a chance to do another season of [ Gigi Does It], to see if I could explore the story more, or the character more, and also find an easier way to make the show. We never got that opportunity. But I'll always be super, super proud of it.

[Lauren Ambrose's] character [in Can't Hardly Wait] feels real and unexaggerated and becomes sort of a heroine archetype. I think that was cool. It wasn't in every one of those comedies.

The freedom of knowing that you're doing something off-kilter is liberating.

Still, at the end of the day, I was really proud of [ Gigi Does It]. I wish more people had seen it. I wish it was more available, so people would see it now.

I was doing a Broadway play, and I was really new to this business. The Broadway play was my first job, literally. The play next door was a musical called Falsettos. The director got hired to direct this Michael J. Fox movie and was looking for a kid who could play brash and salty and mean [in Life With Mikey].

Me, I look in the mirror and all I see is this Jewish kid from Queens.