"I was a mime. I'm not kidding. I went to Northwestern University and they have a mime company, so we did a lot of training and then a lot of mime shows around Chicago."
"I think that some people like to be someone other than themselves when acting, while others are most themselves. I fall into the second camp. For me, acting is a great exercise in getting to the truth about myself."
"There are a great number of people from New Jersey who go on to have pretty successful careers."
"I'm kind of a Luddite myself. I've got a bunch of typewriters at home. I'm a big fan of old technology."
"To me, one of the things I love about being an actor is that it's never done; it's never perfect, and so it's the process. It's like practicing being okay with things not being perfect and things being outside of your control."
"I did a lot of theater, so especially as an on-camera camera actor, there are so many things that aren't in your toolbox. They're somebody else's job. You think about editors and rhythm. Volume isn't even in your control."
"The storytelling in a movie is in the cut; it's in the edit. It's not an actor's job, really. Your job is such a tiny little thing, and I love the feeling of juggling or tightrope walking."
"I went to a Cal Tech party after the 'Facebook' movie came out, and there were kids in dark rooms coding because it was cool again. That movie made it cool to sit in a room at a party and write code."
"I think it's really rare to see women on television who are brilliant, selfish, vain, fallible - and I feel like I have all those capacities in myself, so it's good to see people in the media representing all of those things."
"I could never understand how to build a computer, but the best I could hope for is to understand the people that do."
"I love smart and curious people. I value intelligence in my friends and relationships."
"Keeping secrets is hard."
"It's a whole series of accidents that makes a show into a hit. A show can be fantastic and still not be a hit. You just have to hit the Zeitgeist at the right moment, and there are so many factors that you're not in control of."
"When I'm working, it's just about doing the best I can with whatever dialogue is in front of me today. You can't worry about the other thing."
"I don't wanna be in a show that's salacious just for the sake of getting viewers."
"Acting, for me, is not an end in itself. It's more a means to asking the questions I'm obsessed with about life."
"For a long time, I really blithely walked around in the world imagining that gender didn't matter any more and behaving like I was on equal footing with other people. And I think, for a long time, it was easy to live in the world that way."
"You do a straight play for three months, four months, maybe. It's so brief. And then you're on to the next thing. I loved that. I love that rhythm and that pace."
"Doing a one-person play feels like you've just discovered you had a superpower."
"One of the ways that I think about my being an artist and an actor is... it's an experiment."
"I'm obviously interested in playing characters who have autonomy, who drive the story."
"I'm not interested in political theater."
"I want to make art that is helpful, that's useful to people, that starts fruitful conversations. That makes you think about a question that you hadn't considered before."
"I am sick to my stomach, just, all the time. The tools in my toolbox to address that are choosing jobs where I can be a full, complete person, where I have some agency and autonomy."
"I think it's a lot harder to forgive yourself for your own mistakes."
