I left the studio at 5:30 in the morning. It's an incredible mind exercise. You have to, obviously, have stamina, but you really feel like you're kind of feeding your mind. It's a challenge of learning lines very fast and then you have to be lose enough to hopefully make good choices in a much shorter amount of time that it takes to film certain scenes.

I love histories. I love learning. I love books that talk about people who made a real impact on history, because it always has to do with who they were at that time and what their personalities were like and what their strengths and weaknesses were.

You have to love the characters you play, even if no one else does.

And when you're with a great crew like we had, it becomes a thrilling, again, collaboration, which is to me one of the great aspects of the process that you go through. I find myself at this point in my career, getting potentially, incredibly bored if I stand around a lot, so that's why I really like the pace of television.

It's gotten out of control. It's taking bigger and bigger names to make smaller and smaller films. I worry that important films without a big name attached won't get made at all.

There are a lot of big spec houses now all across Connecticut, a lot of ostentatious showing of wealth.

I think our family is like a lot of families. We had no vocabulary for mental illness