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 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 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.

When I'm writing my blog, I think of myself at 13 years old, back in St. Louis, daydreaming about Hollywood.

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.

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.

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