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?!"

[With] this show [This Is Us], I don't think I was seeking something outside of the world I'd always played in so much as I'm ruled by characters. If it's a great character, I'm invested. It doesn't matter what the genre, what the storyline, anything.

I saw so many kids 22, 19, with holes the size of a dime and they're dead. It's a gunshot and of course those kids thought they were as tough as nails, they never expected to be dead but they're gone. It's kinda nice to walk out of the County Coroner's Office with a couple of sayings, you know? "You're not so tough being dead on a morgue table."

Think about the physical act of pulling a trigger. The amount of pressure it takes to pull a trigger or the speed it takes to shove a sharp object into somebody. The psychology behind it. Why people kill? Why people don't kill?

How can you sustain life? [Dan] Fogelman is magic, and I think the other scripts of his that I've read for this show specifically are as beautiful as the pilot script [of This Is Us]. And he said it in a meeting [regarding the stillbirth of a child], "You can't kill a baby every week." But I think the idea that you can have these impactful moments that are as heightened as the loss of a child - it's life.

My job is always going to change; the characters that I'm playing are always going to change. I look forward to playing a grandfather at some point.

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.