I'm very deliberate and I love Excel spreadsheets and I love five-year plans and all that. So it felt really fun to play someone so incredibly different from myself.

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 don't know if this is true of everyone, but I have this relationship with my parents where, despite however mature or articulate or grown-up I think I've become, as soon as I go home, I turn into this petulant 13-year-old, especially with the tone of my voice.

I still get nervous when I have a lot of makeup on, a big hairdo, and a dress.

I'm a believer in the parent first, friend second philosophy, and trying to find that balance.

There's a part of me that wishes I had gone to school and gotten a business degree, because I almost wonder if that wouldn't be more helpful than my theater degree, in some ways.