When the creator of the show is gone, the actors end up being the people who have been there the longest.

I remember feeling a huge amount of anxiety and worry and pressure. At that point I was headed into acting school. That was 100 percent the only thing I thought I wanted to do. But then I got through my first year of college, and I was, like, humming and rolling around, pretending to be a lion in acting classes at NYU and visiting our classmate Charlie Gregg at Harvard, where he was actually learning things. So I changed my mind: I decided I actually wanted a different kind of education, and that was an incredibly freeing idea.

All TV shows are basically part of the same storyline.

My mother had lived in London since I was little, so she never got to see my school plays and stuff.

That's the thing that always stuck out to me - the idea that quantity becomes quality. I always took it to mean if you do anything enough, if you keep putting effort in, eventually something will happen, with or without you. You don't have to have faith when you start out, you just have to dedicate yourself to practice as if you have it.

Like my dad, I have a Christmas party most years. I like to celebrate and see as many people as possible.

The thing I don't like on television is when somebody does something that makes absolutely no sense just for the shock of it.