My dad was a journalist. He was in Rwanda right after the genocide. In Berlin when the wall came down. He was always disappearing and coming back with amazing stories. So telling stories for a living made sense to me.

So, from a very young age, my mom tells me that I wanted to be Michael J. Fox. I didn't want to be an actor. I just wanted to be Michael J. Fox for awhile. And then, I realized that he was an actor, so I pursued that.

I like the chance to work on material. Sometimes it helps to not be going into a room cold and to know people.

I just love shows that don't hand everything to you, that ask you to be smarter. I think that's something really important that HBO has done to change the landscape of TV.

I ended up doing literally every television show ever made, for at least a day. It was great to see how that worked. That's how I cut my teeth.

Anytime I met an actor, I just attacked them and said, 'How did you do this?' Eventually, I began to realize that you went to school for it. I wasn't a bright kid, so it took me a long time to figure that out.

I was really a charmer; I was the guy who would get to the office, the principal would sit me down and within 10 minutes, we'd be, like, talking about some movies or something.