I just try to bring a kind of consciousness to the work I'm doing. I'll worry about the next job when I have the next job. There are a lot worse things than being known for a certain kind of specificity. You'll get calls for that thing. And that's better than not getting any calls at all.

I've spent hundreds of days on commercial sets in the last ten years. If I didn't learn something along the way, I wasn't paying very close attention.

Before my commercial career, I never played for more than an audience of 99 seats somewhere in downtown New York, but occasionally someone would recognize me in the subway and say, "Oh, I saw you in that play, you were really great in that," or "the director was really something." It becomes a conversation. When people spot me on the street from my work in commercials, there's nowhere for the conversation to go. Obviously I'm an actor and I can't.

I feel very grateful. I wasn't raised with money. My parents were schoolteachers; I was raised on a small farm. It never dawned on me that I would have a job that someone would pay me to do. Much less a job like this. It would be ridiculous if I had any complaints about it. And look - I've had the opportunity to learn an entirely new set of skills, and I'm bringing them to the work I'm doing now in filmmaking.

I feel like the places where I like to live, or study, or visit are places where people's differences are celebrated rather than just tolerated.

I share with a lot of people who have seen The Green film at gay film festivals when you are the only gay guy on the block, you feel this responsibility to be this ambassador. You spend a lot of time making sure that other people feel comfortable with you. The perception that we project on that community, that gets in the way of a clear line of communication.

I did one interview with the Atlantic. It was very interesting; I could write an entire book on that one experience. I've never had any type of public persona outside of the face recognition I have with this job, so I was really ill prepared to have this conversation. I think the real story was that it became a source for a flurry of other derivative stories. I remember the Post headline said "Marcarelli's Bizarre Life," which to me is code for gay, primarily.