I like the idea of building this wandering, epic narrative in a form that people don't expect epic narratives to appear.

I'm a big John Steinbeck fan. Cormac McCarthy. I've always loved the stories of regular people. Mark Twain, too. When you look back at some of the epic writers of our country's history, very rarely do you find upper-class royalty. We seem to delve into the struggle of life and the labor of life much more frequently.

Oftentimes, when people don't respond to text messages or emails, I just start writing long, long in-depth essays and diatribes where characters start to appear and narrative threads begin.

I rarely accept things on blind faith, especially the orthodoxy of any given practice, or any given practicum. I'm like, "Oh come on. Is this the way to do things?"

I'm a young actor and I haven't learned everything there is about acting.

There's sort of a very symbiotic thing that happens on good TV shows with great writers, which is that they start to sort of embrace who the actors are and try to make the roles more specific to what they bring and what they can do.

I think that's part of the fun of being an actor - you get to not be normal all of the time.