I have mad luck. I'm super-good at games like backgammon or anything that requires rolling dice.
I hate going to bed. I read scripts, clean, listen to the radio - I've fallen asleep to 'This American Life' more times than I can count!
I never wanted to be a playwright.
I don't love the word "quirky." I think it's a word that's a catchall. It's a word that doesn't stand in empathy with the person, it stands in judgment of them. It's a very externalized word.
I really love people. I love to meet people. I'm curious about people.
I took a writing class in college, liked it, and my first year out of school I couldn't get a job, so I wrote a play.
And when I get bored, it's like the worst parts of me come out. I really veer to self-destructive tendencies quickly.
In a way, you normalize your own childhood to yourself, so I never thought about how much I wrote as a kid. So I was there, confronted with it - so many notebooks, so many tiny plays. Every week we put on a play. We had a big futon, so my sister and I would use the futon as our stage, and I wrote little skits and made her faint because I found it so funny.
I've always really been interested in the Pygmalion myth and both what it has to say about creativity and what it has to say about relationships between men and women.
I think movies have much more magic than the theater. Theater can be a magical experience, but movies thrust their subjectivity on you in a more profound way.
I read a lot of plays as a kid, but I didn't see that many plays, so I feel better-versed in film history and film structure. I just think it's easier to think in pictures.
I'm definitely feeling whatever's going on pretty hard. It's like playing Barbies. You're holding the Barbies, but all of the action is happening inside of your head. You might be holding them or even speaking out loud, but really, all of the animation is internal. That's sort of how I feel about my writing. And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, "Hmm, there's half a page that's good here." Then you throw out everything else.
I love bad movies, whereas going to the theater for me is a painful experience. I think it's really hard to sit and watch actors do something live and have it not go well.
Anytime that I've felt uninspired, I don't force myself to sit down and write. I only do it when I feel the impulse.
I'm klutzy, and I don't embarrass easily.
On a personal level, just for me in my own work, I would say the most interesting thing has been getting to work with the people that I've worked with.
If I ever feel that acting is just soul-sucking and I don't want to do it anymore, I could stop.
Lena Dunham or Miranda July, those people are sort of thinking about their work in a slightly different way than I do, where their whole body is a seed of what they're creating. I can't imagine watching Miranda's movies with anybody else playing her role, she's so integral. But for me, it feels more like every story is really individual. If I thought of something else, or thought it should be my body representing it, I'd fold my body into it. But most of the time I'm writing to get something out of my body.
I think everyone is always asking themselves, How is my work meaningful, how is my life meaningful? As I get older, I feel like who I am as a person and a citizen is more important than who I am in my work. But I do think it reframed slightly for me, how much I have to care about a project in order to want to do it. Sometimes, obviously, you have a take a job for money. But I think I'm quicker now when I get a script that's, say, borderline misogynist, I'm not going to go in for it. I'm thinking more about what I'm putting into the world.
I quite enjoy a high-waisted cotton panty.
A lot of what I've had produced are plays, and I just don't want to do that. It's different than a movie, where you only have to act the scenes the one time, and you have other collaborators helping you make it better, so you don't feel as obsessed with your own mind. Plays you have to do every single night, and the thought of that is agony to me. There are days when you hate your own work, and you don't want to be confronted with that, have it coming out of your mouth or listening to somebody else say it to you. There are days you want to leave the theater and get a drink.
You know, it only happens a handful of times in your career, where you walk out of an audition feeling like all the stars aligned, my preparation paid off, something magical happened in the room. I've gotten really lucky and I've gotten to work a lot, and I would say it's only happened, like, two or three times, where I've walked out and been like, This was the right thing and the right choice and they should just cast me.
I have a lot more writing experience than Paul Dano has, so to be able to put that experience to use in exercising his vision was almost an acting exercise: How would I write if I were Paul? When I look at it, it feels so completely his, but it's also mine.
I don't think a lot of people are like, "I'm just quirky!" Or if they are, it's a stage they're going through as they figure out who they are. I never felt like I was choosing roles that were quirky.
If I was born into a household with anxiety about money, I wouldn't have had as much freedom to be in my own world. So it's impossible for me to divorce the privilege of my childhood from the other things.
