I have an obsessive character. I manicure my nails at three in the morning because nobody else can do it the right way. Maybe that's the secret to my success.

I campaigned for [Barack] Obama for more than a year. I was in Iowa, Minnesota, California, Arizona - just traveling around to help get the word out. It was such a huge, spirited campaign, and so positive. But you travel around to cities in the U.S. now and there's just this hopelessness that has set in. It makes it hard to understand why it seems so impossible to make any kind of progressive change with an administration that is seemingly progressive, or why we keep encountering such political roadblocks to change.

Everything you do is different, and you find different chords in every character that you play that strike true with you.

I'm just in work mode, and that prevents me from going into the Hollywood starlet mode, I suppose.

I still eat a burger at a counter with ketchup dripping down my face.

Improvisation has never been my strong point.

You really hope that people who want to be politically active aren't so disillusioned at this point. I do feel positive about what's happening. I think that with all of these movements, and this growing collective voice that's emerging, people are starting to come out of the kind of dazed state that they were in for so many years. But it's tough to know the best way to effect change now. Campaigning alone no longer seems to be the answer.