Any other illness, any other disease that we're faced with, there's sympathy and understanding. We get help for those. With mental illness, our go-to is to categorize them as, 'Oh, they're crazy,' to belittle the problem.
I was one of those weirdos who, at six years old, was telling everybody that I wanted to be an actor. I saw my sister in a play and realized that I wanted to play make believe in front of people; I was always goofing around and putting on shows for my family.
I did a severe amount of plays in high school. I was in every single show that my drama club produced. Then in the summer I would do plays, and I was also playing sports. I was probably a hellish kid, come to think of it, for my parents' schedule. But then I went to college in North Carolina.
I prefer to make my own coffee at home because I love the experience of measuring out the beans and finding the right grind setting, messing with water amounts, etc. It's truly an art form, and I'm obsessed with it. In L.A., I love Blue Bottle and Intelligentsia and used to hang at Bru in Los Feliz.
Sometimes you hate villains, but you love that you hate them, and it finds this happy medium where you enjoy the process of loathing them so much that you want them to be there. It's such a weird, twisted thing that our minds do.
I've just always sort of been mesmerized by our minds and how people think and how people react differently.
If I wasn't making a movie, I was trying to master a new musical instrument or trying to teach myself how to shave with a straight razor. I had to find the weirdest things just to increase my understanding of other cultures or other arts or intellectual pursuits.
It was a natural progression for me to find that if acting was what made me most comfortable, the best thing for me to progress toward was television and film.
I studied religions and all kinds of other things in college. I took a Shakespearean villain course for English literature. It was really intense. I think that sort of rounds a person. In this business, it's really important for us to be interesting... and have interests.
