I came in ["MADtv"] kind of late in the season. Some of the producers didn't want me but the network did. It was all (messed up) from the beginning.

Actually, when I was young, I believe I met Nicolas Cage. I think I was probably eight, and I remember seeing him at somebody's house - it was an event and he happened to be there. People would ask me if I was his son, because I looked like him at that point, so I do remember feeling some connection and just wanting to say, like, 'Papa!'

Well, I think that everybody is kind of a nerd at heart.

Generally people are nice, but it's so weird that it has made me more cautious. Just like anyone else, I like looking around at my environment, but now as I walk down the street I tend to look down.

I wanted to move on. I wanted to do acting. The next thing I did after [MADtv] was a good hybrid of that. I did this show with Bob Odenkirk and Derek Waters (creator of Comedy Central's "Drunk History") and it was a little homegrown thing that we shot and then we sold it to HBO. We made a pilot and HBO didn't pick it up, but then we made all these webisodes. This was before streaming stuff online made any sense. (The episodes are available on YouTube). Nobody even knew how to watch things on the internet.

There's also these moments when you're like, oh, I really want to do different things. Not instead of this show [The Big Bang Theory]. It's just a hunger to do something else, too.

It's not really about confidence. It's just something that isn't really in the vocabulary of what goes on at work. The writers write and the actors act.