I know what I look like - a weird, sad clown puppet. I'm fine with that.

I want to keel over on stage playing King Lear at age 99 or something like that.

I can relate to someone whose life is falling apart, and they are doing the best to get by, using humor to survive. Backstrom really wears his heart on his sleeve and his life is unraveling... I would much rather hang out with that person than a slick procedural detective who has all the answers... it's human, it's frail, it's interesting.

Some of the biggest movie stars in the world are essentially characters.

Well, Dwight was born to be No. 2 and I don't think he would know what to do as a leader. But he loves following. He would have made a great fascist.

I've always been terrible on regular sitcoms with lots of jokes. I don't know how to tell jokes.

When I grew up in Seattle, by the way, in the 70's, it was a fishing village. There were loggers and fishers and my dad had a sewer company and it wasn't the way Seattle is now. Culturally, it was very different back then.