It's so easy to disappear into your character because there isn't all this fuss around you, and we keep a closed set, and closed off to all crew members, even, unless we're cut. A lot of times, you're doing a scene in a movie and there are literally 35 people standing behind the camera all waiting to do their job, but here they have to be off the stage. On The Office, it is very much just the actors, a cameraman and a boom operator, like a real documentary, like we really are being documented.

I knew I wanted to be an actor, and I didn't necessarily need or want to be famous or a celebrity actor. But I wanted to be somewhere where there would be no ceiling on what I could accomplish, and I felt like if I stayed in St. Louis I might have a really great regional theater career or something, but that I wasn't going to be able to get much further than that. And it felt like New York and L.A. were the two places where you could end up being a TV star or you could end up doing regional theater, which would have been fine as well.

Tilda Swinton is a great example of a person who completely disappears into a role.

I had a teacher who said something great. That was, 'Go out and collect your nos. Once you get fifty nos then you can start wondering when you can get a yes.' He said, 'It is not your job to get the job; its your job to do a consistent body of work. So, every time you go in there, just go in there and be consistent, and eventually it will get noticed and someone will hire you.'

Growing up, I was a very shy, wallflower type. I was not a nerd, but not popular. I was just invisible, like that person you probably didn't know you were in school with.

Finally, I was called for "The Office" and I was really lucky, because a lot of the shows that I went out for I would work my way up from, like, an audition with the casting director to the director to the producers to the studio, I'd go through seven auditions, and then they'd give the role to a famous actress.

I spent my whole adolescence, when you just want to be accepted, looking much younger than everyone else.