A straight factor is important in any comedy, because you need something to tee it up and also to ground it.
I can be on a telephone call, and be emailing or texting somebody else, as well. I would imagine everyone appreciates that efficiency of communication. I see it as a huge positive.
I remember my dad working with me on breaking down my script and writing out a back story for my character and all that stuff.
I played a ton of team sports growing up, and team wins are just incredibly gratifying.
I only wanted to get married once, so when I felt I was ready to handle it, I looked at my relationships and noticed that boyfriends get tired of girlfriends, and vice versa, but you never get tired of your friends.
I don’t really find a problem with technology or television, or anything. I’m a product of it. I grew up watching TV, and I don’t think I’m too dumb or too crazy.
I never looked at fan mail, for some reason. My mother and grandmother handled my mail – although it’s not like I was ever in the stratosphere of Kirk Cameron or Scott Baio.
I have to warn you: I bet horses like a girl.
I don’t worry about people misinterpreting my kindness for weakness.
Guys like Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Sacha Baron Cohen, they do things you love to watch. I like to do the other half.
And I’ve always loved commercials. I like working out how to organically weave a brand’s message into the writing process. It’s like an improv show, where comics ask the audience to throw out a word and a skit is built around it.
I became an adult before I had a kid, which I highly recommend. I just like to throw her around. She’s a really good snuggler, and she likes to give kisses and hugs.
Our job, as actors, is to just try to be as accurate and as mindful of what the audience is going through and receiving and processing. If it’s a situation where the character should look a little bit out of control or do something stupid, it’s your job to act into that, in a believable way.
The longer you stay in the job that you do the more you learn about what those around you do. As an actor I’ve always nosed around apologetically about: “oh wouldn’t it be interesting if I could do that?” I can’t imagine not wanting to do this everyday.
There are worse things than being constantly hired to do anything.
I’ve always felt bad that I never had more information to give people when they asked me about it, but I guess people kind of got frustrated by that and they just started kind of making up their own sort of “well, we haven’t heard that much” or “news hasn’t changed so it must be going away”.
As an actor, you only get to work 15 minutes an hour; as a director you’re fully immersed. It’s incredibly more complex and challenging and I love it. I’m sort of a glutton for work and to direct something that I’m acting in feeds the vein.
When you’re actor, you have no idea how much work goes into pre-production. We’re just sitting in our trailers waiting for someone to knock on our door to go to the set.
Directing a movie is the greatest job in the world. I could not be more envious of the guys who get to do it all the time.
What’s frustrating as an actor, when you want to work hard, you can only work once that phone rings and then you can only work until the production wraps. Then you have to find another job.
My comedic instinct, is a little bit more rooted in – my mother’s British so I’ve always been more of the dry receiver of the crazy as opposed to the initiator of the crazy. I’m kind of predisposed to be the straight man.