When I was young, I learned very early on that I could make my mother laugh. And that was one of the greatest sounds I ever heard.

You risk working with this director, you risk making this movie, you risk working with another actor you don't know. It makes your heart beat faster. And it keeps you interested.

I often make the analogy with tennis. Every match the rules are the same, but no game is ever the same. Theatre is like that. Every time is different.

To look in the eyes of audiences and see the kind of naughty glee that they got with being on the inside, the audience becomes your co-conspirators.

After graduation, I was floundering in L.A., doing stand-up comedy and working in a shoe store in the Valley.

The characters created cannot just be a mouthpiece for the writer. When you look at a piece of writing, and it's genuine and it doesn't feel like every character is just a mouthpiece for the writer, but that they've been created in such a way that they're expressing an idea that a writer wants to get across, that's when a story succeeds.

I've been intrigued by politics my whole life. And, yes, I am very close to the Clintons. I was a Hillary person until I was an Obama person. And she was a Hillary person, too, until she was an Obama one, evidently.