If there's a criteria that really gets me interested in a work besides any type of personal interaction with the theme, it's if I feel like this is the right piece of work for that director at that moment in their career.

But work that's got real substance does make people feel, "There's someone else out there who relates to my experience, or who just helped me understand my own experience a little bit better." And I think that's still got enormous value.

I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it.

I tend to have a kind of tunnel vision when I'm looking at an individual piece.

It's ginned up by the corporate plutocracy as a way of distracting the working-class people that it's screwing. We hamstring our own natural progressivism in this country, and that's really stupid.

Young people know how to use these social networking tools, and they know how to use them effectively.

The deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away. It's more challenging to me, but it's also just interesting. Those are the things I like to watch. I like to watch the evolutions of something.