You want the story to end when it's supposed to and not be squeezed for somebody's financial gain.

None of my characters have really had jobs.

I personally was driven to be an actor for the love of telling a story. It was very closely linked to being a reader as a kid and being transported by literature and art. It had nothing - zero - to do with anything resembling fame.

It's great to have an acting job in the age of Reality TV.

It's core to my beliefs now: Sometimes in being given a challenge, you're actually being given a real opportunity, and a lot of that is how you handle it. Do you feel sorry for yourself or do you think, All right! I'll see what I can make out of this? I've had that over and over. If I hang out in the disappointment, I'll just be disappointed all the time.

All my references are 50 years old-when somebody shot J.R., you know? Oh my god, I'm 100!

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.