So much of how you look at yourself in the mirror reflects how you feel about yourself, and how you comport yourself.

My favorite actor on the planet is Gena Rowlands and she plays women who, to me, somehow defy gender. They are women, they are feminine, they are masculine, they are everything. There's something exciting about that. I don't know how to articulate it exactly. I guess it's busting out of the archetypes a little bit and not feeling restricted.

I love people, watching people interact. It's a lot of psychology. We learn about ourselves by watching other people's lives on the screen.

I find comedy to be really scary, because it can go so wrong so easily, and the margin for error is so huge - and I guess that's what makes it funny, that tension.

As a kid, I wanted to be a boy because I equated that with strength. There's a problem with that. It's only growing into my own womanhood that I realize how warped that is that I was attributing strength to male qualities.

I think in the inception and creation of the characters, improv was the most important part for me, because I wanted to feel at home in those characters. I wanted to feel like I could commit to them. And so much of improv is saying yes and committing, so I think that's where the improv came in. Even if I'm saying yes to the X across the room from me, or the tennis ball on a stick, I have to stay alive.

All the foundation work you plant in the early seasons pay off in stronger storylines deep into our seasons. I think that only aids in performance.