It's a daunting thing to be playing a real person and to have contact with her and meet her and be in her circle a little bit. It's an odd thing. There's so much responsibility to tell the story honestly and truthfully, and at the same time, you start to develop a friendship with this person - or I did.
I worked with dance a lot, for each character - different ways I could move my body, different music. It's the most fun thing in the world, because I love each and every one of the characters and I'd be happy just to play one of them, but the fact that I get to play upwards of six, seven, eight or whatever, it's a total dream.
I think the idea of family and protecting the family is something that ties a lot of these women together.
The whole press thing and who you are in the media, or what you have to project yourself to be, it feels very much like another person. People say to me, "Oh, your life must be changing," and I'm like, "Uh, I guess?" For me, it's such a gradual change, and I don't see it from the outside like everybody else does. It's weird, I see my face on a bus or online or somebody has my picture as their picture on Twitter and it's all a bit weird and I feel very disconnected from it and very much, "I guess that's me." It's very surreal.
When I was a kid, it was the attention I got from it, the immediate response from the audience, the thrill of being onstage. That's carried over into my adult life, I can't pretend I don't like the attention or whatever, but for me now, I've witnessed incredible performances that have changed the way I see the art form.
I find comedy to be really scary, because it can go so wrong so easily, and the margin for error is so huge - and I guess that's what makes it funny, that tension.
For me, comedians are like the epitome for everything great, and they terrify me. I just want to be them. I want to be like them.
My favorite actor on the planet is Gena Rowlands and she plays women who, to me, somehow defy gender. They are women, they are feminine, they are masculine, they are everything. There's something exciting about that. I don't know how to articulate it exactly. I guess it's busting out of the archetypes a little bit and not feeling restricted.
I think there's something really freeing about improv, that it's a collective, creative, in-the-moment piece. That's really exciting and really frustrating, because it's there and gone. There's an amazing interaction with the audience that happens because they are very much another scene partner. How they respond determines the kinds of stories we tell.
I'm an actor, so I'm interested in the pursuit of storytelling and character and challenging myself and expanding my craft. That's not something that ever ends, because as you grow as a person, so does your capacity to play different characters. New things come up, new things you want to explore and new stories you want tell about life and your knowledge of things. I don't think there's ever going to be that satisfaction of "and now, comfort."
You learn from the actors that you're working with. I've taken a lot from all of them.
You're revealing something about yourself in a more exaggerated, more fleshed-out way, and it awakens something in you that maybe you didn't know you had.
I'm an actor and I like having attention. There's a reason I like being on stage and in front of the camera, and it's that interaction.
John Cassavetes' films have really altered the way I see film and acting and storytelling and emotion and love, so I see acting as this incredible revealing of human nature and this means of telling our story, sharing our voice with the world. That's what acting is for me. It allows for people to experience things through the character, through the story.
I haven't really done a lot of comedy. It's something that terrifies me.
I like 'Futurama.' That's kind of the only thing that's my sci-fi thing, although I was big into zombies for a time.
I love hip-hop; I love Sleigh Bells. I also love classical music and musical theater.
I'm a huge 'Futurama' fan, so that's my closest sci-fi tendency.
I started out as a dancer as a kid; I've been dancing since I was 4. So performing was always part of what I was.
Sex isn't hard, but intimacy is terrifying.
Auditions are not a natural environment, and you feel judged, even though everyone is just excited to find the right person.
It's always been my dream to just continually do really cool indie movies - character-driven stuff.
Film has always been where my heart is.
We do long-form-style improv. Our focus was characters and telling a long arc story over about an hour and a half. It was closer to a one-act play than one-off sketches.
I was in a Nativity play as a kid. Back then, I played the donkey.
