I have made decisions based from purely an actor's point of view.

Allow the diversity to exist. There is nothing wrong with it. Hell, we put up with the religious right-we can put up with transgendered human beings.

It took Sydney Pollack a long time to get me to do Tootsie. I asked myself if I wanted to play some frothy, ditzy character after I had just done Frances. Obviously, I'm thrilled that I did.

Usually, you get a script and you have the whole story. All the acts are there, for a play. You know what happens in the first, second and third acts, and you know how it starts, where you go and where it finishes. [With American Horror Story: Asylum], it's a whole new experience. I don't know where it's going, and I don't know what's going to happen next. It's been an interesting way to work. It's made me work in a much more fluid, braver way, just taking every chance that comes along.

When I am home for like a two-year stretch, I get antsy, because I want to work.

Sometimes the odds are against you-the director doesn't know what the hell he's doing, or something falls apart in the production, or you're working with an actor who's just unbearable.

The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.