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 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. I think that probably, at my core, if I had done no work on myself, I would probably be Laura from The Mysteries Of Laura, but I worked hard to be a more stable person because that's what I wanted out of my life.

Sometimes doing a movie for a short period of time is better than committing eight months to a television show.

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.

As the lead of a movie, you really set the tone off-camera as well, and that's a really big responsibility.

I think I am an actress and I'm artistic and I love spontaneity and all of that, but I just decided really early on that if I didn't also try to ground myself I would probably end up like this character of Laura in A Little Help , or like so many young people in Hollywood, sort of go off the rails. So I'm pretty attached to my routines and my grounded ways.

The Farrelly brothers make movies the way you imagine a movie set would be when you're a kid - fun all the time.