Heroes' really changed the game for me in a way that nothing before it had.

We [with Neal Dodson and Corey Moosa] were constantly looking for features and looking for ways to get involved with people who were making stuff.

I love playing characters that go to extreme places, and I love to explore different kinds of psychological landscapes, so it is ultimately a kind of fun, but it's also complicated and colored by the depth of the nastiness of it, at certain times, as well.

People always ask me what I think, if Edward Snoden is a hero, if he's a villain. I don't really tend to moralize it so much as I feel like he's a whistleblower. He's someone who saw a wrongdoing and in order to shine a light on that wrongdoing had to bend some rules and break some laws along the way.

We did monologues and scenes, and New York I did a scene from Amadeus and a monologue from Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead by Eric Bogosian, and then in L.A. I switched the scene to This is Our Youth and did the same monologue. I was spiky-haired, super skinny. A lot of people were like, "You should come here and do a sitcom." That was the feedback that I got. Obviously it was quite a different journey than the one I've actually had, but I just listened to people.

Other actors are not my concern, and that's their life and that's their journey. Everybody has to get to a point in their own time and their own way.

My dad died when I was a kid, so I think it became a place for me to go where my mom knew that I was safe and taken care of and looked after.