I'm always being asked to play roles or characters that I don't really resemble.

I look for every opportunity to mix comedy and horror and tragedy. I love catching audiences off-guard.

Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.

My father was a man of the theater. I grew up in a theater family. As a young man, as a boy, I gypsied around with my siblings and my parents to, like, eight different towns, went to eight different schools. All those things were extremely formative, and I think that's what happens.

It's very interesting, I had an extremely intense experience with my dad in 2002, when he was an old man and very ill and I was taking care of him and my mother, and he was extremely depressed, virtually lost the will to live, and I realized my main job was cheering him up to save his life.

When you end a successful sitcom, the most sensible thing to do is go back to the theater.

Any character you play, you're on his side. You do have the third eye that looks at what an appalling creature he is, but you have to look at what's good about him.