The more you can create that magic bubble, that suspension of disbelief, for a while, the better.

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.

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.

Any questions I had about whether a redneck from Oklahoma could become a Brown Classical Philosophy professor ended when I met Tim [Blake Nelson].

On the downside, to paraphrase Thom Yorke talking about the music business, we're still having to deal with the stench of the last fart of the dying corpse of this regressive vision that America is a white, middle-aged, male, conservative country.

When I was very small, I had that first-time-you-see-a-play experience, which immediately made me want to act, because it seemed like this incredible outlet for something I was already doing fairly compulsively anyway, which was putting on hats and costumes and doing funny voices. It was a very natural compulsion for me.

I tend to relate to a character in terms of the arc: what's interesting is where he starts versus where he ends up.