You don't realize how much a part of your character is part of yourself until you are no longer playing that character.

The hardest thing to do as an actor is to be simplistic, and to just be.

That movie [Jawbreaker] was so much fun to shoot. We were all in our mid-20s at the time, playing high school students. Which was the point. It was the point of the film to hire older actors to play high school students. But we had a blast.

It's really interesting - I wanted to become an actress when I was young because I wanted to do romantic comedy. And I did a lot of comedies very early on, but then my career took kind of a left turn with Joss Whedon, and I discovered that doing genre work is actually more interesting as an actor, because the given circumstances are more extreme. And it really is creatively more challenging.

I loved working on that show [Defiance]. I mean, that show was brutal. We worked long, brutal hours in really brutal weather.

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.

I remember reading an interview that Anthony Hopkins had given about how he developed Hannibal Lecter. He said he just looked in the mirror and, I forget exactly what it was, but he looked in the mirror and realized that when he smiled, it looked creepy.