Be willing to work for nothing in things you think are stupid. Make work for yourself. Make your own luck. Don't complain. Hopefully, the work will find you if you are ready.

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.

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 went to a little liberal-arts college in Missouri called Truman State University.

I think that there is a tragic misfit at the core of me, and I've just done a lot of work on myself. I love a good self-help book; I've read a ton of them. I love self-help seminars and therapy and all that.

Laura from The Mysteries Of Laura is the most different from me personally that I've ever played. I'm a very thoughtful, forward-thinking, planner kind of person. I love Excel spreadsheets and five-year-plans, and I love to review every year how my New Year's resolutions went. I'm like that, and that is not Laura at all.

I say it was like this accidental research that I did for eight years. I had no idea I was researching the role of my career. But yeah, and there was this one casting director named Allison Jones, and for five years she would call me in every year for a different TV show and she just really was a big supporter of mine.