I can juggle, not well... I can balance a broom on my chin. I can do very simple carny tricks, a little sleight of hand with cards and coins.
('Mad Men') was my final audition of the pilot season. It had been three miserable, horrible months where I had zero callbacks, zero positive reception, one of those pilot seasons that makes you pretty sure you are never going to be an actor and never want to be an actor. And then that happened.
In college, my friend Melanie and I used to have weekly Jimmy Stewart viewings, and 'Harvey' seemed to make its way into the rotation an inordinate amount of times.
For the three years I lived in New York leading up to moving out to Los Angeles for 'Mad Men,' I was an office temp at Ernst & Young in Times Square. That's about as desk-jobby as it can get. There was a lot of, 'Go two floors up and make a copy of this and then bring it to me.'
Gaming has been a great way to get to know people. That's part of what I love about games, that they are social.
The amount of times my wife has rolled her eyes at board games is impossible to count.
I'm a Joseph Abboud fan. I'm a Hugo Boss fan. I'm a Brooks Brothers fan. As far as suits go, those are my go-tos.
Frankly, as much as I love to improvise, it hasn't been difficult to stick to the script on 'Mad Men.' The writing is so precise, and the story so carefully crafted, that I don't think there's room - or need - for ad libbing. I could never come up with dialogue as lovely as these writers do, anyway.
I don't have the confidence to pull off a moustache.
Improv definitely made me a better auditioner, without a doubt. We did do an audition semester in grad school, and that was helpful for those times that you have a script and you have a few days to prepare it, to really work on sides. But the auditions I was doing in New York, if you got it the night before, you were very lucky.
I abhor 'baby talk.' I speak to kids like I would any other person, and they seem to respond to it.
Three times a year, theres Strategicon convention, and I go for the board games. It happens Presidents Day, Labor Day, and Memorial Day weekends. You go and take a look at the new board games and meet a couple of board game designers, and you can check out games you dont own from the library and then return them.
I would like to ban people being allowed to text while in a crosswalk.
The 12 years that I was improvising are why I got the number of commercials I got when I was in New York and why I got The Devil Wears Prada, and its why I even got in the door for Mad Men.
I don't know if it's the sunshine, or the fact that I actually have a job, but I do like L.A. a lot. In New York, it can be gray and rainy and cold, and you still don't have any money, and you feel like a bad Dickens character.
I'm a bit of a nerd, and my extracurricular activity is nerd games.
I have an RSS reader, Feeddler. I mostly subscribe to board game blogs - they have reviews of new games and discussions about trends. It's straight-up dork talk.
I've certainly had less practice at fatherhood than I have at acting, but in fatherhood, at least my failures are private!
After 'Urinetown,' 'Avenue Q' and now 'Mormon,' is there an envelope remaining to be pushed?
I only aim for fashion that's long dead.
My only foray into anything stock-market-related was in my eighth grade social studies class. I have steered clear ever since.
Im pretty quick to delete something off of my phone if its become obsolete. And things like RSS readers have made life easier - all of the headlines are going to be related to a topic Im interested in.
Before 'Mad Men,' I definitely had very dry spells and I know what those feel like, and I don't think that ever leaves you as an actor.
