I can safely say that I had an incredibly difficult and trying past growing up and trying to be an artist and standing up as who I am in this world.

The best experience for me at CMU was being on stage so much, getting that comfort ability and learning that technique you can use with any type of work because you’re comfortable with it and know your skill as an actor.

I’ve been a con artist since I was 16 and trying to get my dad to buy me a car. I never succeeded, but I learnt a lot of tactics.

One of the many things I love about working with Ryan Murphy is that you're always thin-sliced in this business. You walk into a room and people want you to be how you look or how you're perceived or whatever it is in that 10 minutes that hey meet you. I think Ryan [Murphy] has an intuition that looks a little bit deeper and sees things that other people might not see in you - sometimes you might not even see in yourself - but that he knows are there and that he might want to get to grow and stretch with as an actor.

Forget horror icon, Kety Bates is an icon. She's an acting icon. I was raised on so many of her films, everything from Misery to Fried Green Tomatoes to Delores Claiborne, all films that I've watched multiple times and been inspired by.

What we really have to do is stop the adjective before the job title — whether it's 'black actor,' a 'gay actor' or 'anything actor,' Everybody thinks that equality comes from identifying people, and that's not where equality comes from. Equality comes from treating everybody the same regardless of who they are. I hope the media and the press catches on to that because it's time to move out of 1992.

Kids aren't born to be bullies, they're taught to be bullies.