I'm a lover of lists and five-year plans and Excel spreadsheets. Any way that I can have any control over the direction my life is going, I gravitate towards that.
Be willing to work for nothing in things you think are stupid. Make work for yourself. Make your own luck. Don't complain. Hopefully, the work will find you if you are ready.
Growing up, I was a very shy, wallflower type. I was not a nerd, but not popular. I was just invisible, like that person you probably didn't know you were in school with.
When I'm writing my blog, I think of myself at 13 years old, back in St. Louis, daydreaming about Hollywood.
I'm not prepared for a zombie apocalypse. I need more bottled water, a shotgun, and stronger abs. I have plenty of canner food.
With "The Office," they said, "We don't want anyone we recognize, so give us unknown actors," and I think that was the break that I needed. Because I went in and I got the role.
It is part of me; I could definitely be that if I wanted to, I just choose not to. I mean, I am an actress at my core, and I think we're all a little crazy.
Sometimes acting is really cool because it forces you to exercise certain muscles in your personality that you wouldn't normally be called upon in life.
I'd been out in Los Angeles for about eight years, knocking around. I actually, instead of waiting tables, worked in offices as a temporary assistant.
I had a teacher who said something great. That was, 'Go out and collect your nos. Once you get fifty nos then you can start wondering when you can get a yes.' He said, 'It is not your job to get the job; its your job to do a consistent body of work. So, every time you go in there, just go in there and be consistent, and eventually it will get noticed and someone will hire you.'
I studied theater in college, and I really wanted to be an actress and play a lot of different roles. Then I made landing on a television comedy my main focus. But when you become an actress, you want to play a variety of things.
I spent my whole adolescence, when you just want to be accepted, looking much younger than everyone else.
I think that there is a tragic misfit at the core of me, and I've just done a lot of work on myself. I love a good self-help book; I've read a ton of them. I love self-help seminars and therapy and all that. I think that probably, at my core, if I had done no work on myself, I would probably be Laura from The Mysteries Of Laura, but I worked hard to be a more stable person because that's what I wanted out of my life.
There's a part of me that wishes I had gone to school and gotten a business degree, because I almost wonder if that wouldn't be more helpful than my theater degree, in some ways.
Even in college I tended to get cast in the comedies more. It was what I liked doing.
I don't have real big aspirations to be a movie star. I would love to be on a long-running hit TV show. You end up playing a defining role.
I knew I wanted to be an actor, and I didn't necessarily need or want to be famous or a celebrity actor. But I wanted to be somewhere where there would be no ceiling on what I could accomplish, and I felt like if I stayed in St. Louis I might have a really great regional theater career or something, but that I wasn't going to be able to get much further than that. And it felt like New York and L.A. were the two places where you could end up being a TV star or you could end up doing regional theater, which would have been fine as well.
I'm very deliberate and I love Excel spreadsheets and I love five-year plans and all that. So it felt really fun to play someone so incredibly different from myself.
It's so easy to disappear into your character because there isn't all this fuss around you, and we keep a closed set, and closed off to all crew members, even, unless we're cut. A lot of times, you're doing a scene in a movie and there are literally 35 people standing behind the camera all waiting to do their job, but here they have to be off the stage. On The Office, it is very much just the actors, a cameraman and a boom operator, like a real documentary, like we really are being documented.
Laura from The Mysteries Of Laura is the most different from me personally that I've ever played. I'm a very thoughtful, forward-thinking, planner kind of person. I love Excel spreadsheets and five-year-plans, and I love to review every year how my New Year's resolutions went. I'm like that, and that is not Laura at all.
I say it was like this accidental research that I did for eight years. I had no idea I was researching the role of my career. But yeah, and there was this one casting director named Allison Jones, and for five years she would call me in every year for a different TV show and she just really was a big supporter of mine.
I'm not one to air my dirty laundry for the whole world.
Cause it's really hard, it's hard to be an actor.
My cat, Andy, has been my best buddy since I was 18, and he doesn't care if I'm on a TV show or if I'm red-carpet ready. He just likes it when I'm there.
I don't have any type of sketch-comedy or stand-up background.
