I think, in life, being nervous about something that's forthcoming is very helpful, whether it's an awards show or a family gathering or a job interview. If you're too calm and confident, then I think you aren't executing to the best of your ability. So I try not to let nerves get the best of me, but I welcome them because it tends to fuel me to try harder.

When I auditioned for the show, I didn't realize it was an MTV production, which is going to make for really good tunes during the episodes, if nothing else.

I find myself acting for an editor more, because there's a quick turnaround with television, so you want to try and seem like you're as frenetic as possible, while replicating your movement so you're giving the editor more opportunity to cut within the different takes. If you're so crazy that you're sitting in one take and standing in another, the editor can only choose one take or the other. But if you can wrangle yourself into the same spot over and over, then you give them more choices for you.

The discipline of live theater - doing the same perfect thing night after night, eight times a week - never ceases to amaze me

I sort of pride myself in my dissatisfaction with my work. I've always been concerned with buying the hype, and having that make your performances suffer.

Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. And if some of our institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it is they and not the template, that seem to us disordered and strange.

I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.