[Payne] was a really great experience, and both John [ Larroquette] and JoBeth [Williams] over the years, it's been great reconnecting with them and working with them on other projects as well.

I remember Gale Gordon was in the pilot [of Hi Honey, I'm Home], and it was one of my very first professional gigs without having an adult take me to the job.

I'd been doing comedy up that point and hadn't really done a lot of drama, and then all of a sudden he casts me as a 400-year-old vampire from hell. It was, like, "What?!"

I still have people coming up to me, and it was, what, six or seven years ago when that finale aired? And they tell me who they were watching with, what their emotional reaction was, and how they were devastated for weeks about [Rita's death in Dexter].

I had to do some emergency cram sessions with the dialogue coach on set [of the Punisher: War Zone]. But it was fun, because every actor on that movie had to do an accent, so we were all talking the whole time in our accents.

I didn't tell anybody [had got a role at As Good As It Gets], because I was just going, "Well, that was the strangest audition..." And I just thought, "There's no way he gave me the job on the spot when there was a room full of other girls waiting to audition for it." But then I didn't hear anything for a couple of days, so I finally called my agents, and they're, like, "Oh, yeah, congratulations! We know Jim [L.Brooks] told you in the room that you got it."

I went in for an audition [for As Good As It Gets], but the audition was with James L. Brooks. I was the first girl in that morning, and there was a whole waiting room of girls waiting to read for it. So I did my audition, and he asked me to step outside. So I stepped outside, and when he asked me to come back in, he looked at me, and he said, "Well, I'm very excited to work with you on set." And I was, like, "What?" I thought it was a Hollywood blow-off.