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.

Well, I knew I wanted to be an actor, and I didn't necessarily need or want to be famous or a celebrity actor.

I don't have real big aspirations to be a movie star. I would love to be on a long-running hit TV show. You end up playing a defining role.

I didn't want to go to college. I wanted to move to Los Angeles right out of high school.

Sometimes acting is really cool because it forces you to exercise certain muscles in your personality that you wouldn't normally be called upon in life.

I was definitely raised this way. My folks are very grounded, normal people, and I wasn't raised in the entertainment industry. I just grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, in a very normal family. I wasn't a child actor or anything like that.

I studied theater in college, and I really wanted to be an actress and play a lot of different roles. Then I made landing on a television comedy my main focus.