Every job built my career in some way or made me grow as a person or I got to meet someone great. I had one line on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but I met Will Smith and he took 20 minutes out of his day to talk to the kid with one line. To this day, I think that guy is amazing because of that.

Unless I'm running and yelling, then you really see how crooked my mouth is!

Some were getting married; some were getting divorced. People were in different places, but you had enough time on this earth to actually get somewhere, and I think that's the exciting thing about being 36 and in your mid-30s. You've been somewhere, and you're going to go somewhere. It's fun; it's exciting.

It's [high school] an interesting time in your life because you're trying to act older and mature but you really have no idea what you're doing. You're scared and it's okay to be scared. It's okay to not know completely what you want or what you should be doing and to stumble a little bit.

My sisters and mom raised me to respect women and open doors for them.

When I was born, they didn't work. They're broken, the nerves in my lower left lip. When I was kid, I would talk out of the side of my face. When I was 16 and came up to Hollywood from Orange County, I was in this cattle call audition for Batman and Robin at Warner Bros., and they interviewed me out front of the studio. When I got home, I was like, "Oh, this was exciting!" But then when I watched the news, I was like, "Mom, what is wrong with my mouth?!"

You've got this world, these pathologists that are, day in and day out, taking apart bodies, coming up with theories about how they died and how to better serve the community. At the same time these people have lives outside and families and my character in particular, he has a fiance and things are going well for him, so you've got to show that nice warm compassionate side at the same time you've got to show the steely, icy cool of a doctor. Not only that, but a doctor who gets a bit of a God complex and starts killing people for sport.