Actor

With brain and body, it's great if you have a connection between the two, but when separated, that leads to a lot of conflict.

I was living in a small town in Indiana working as a telemarketer and a vacuum salesman. I was really bad: the vacuums seemed to always be falling apart. Every time I did a demonstration, I'd say, 'This is the material the astronauts used on Apollo 13.' And no sooner had that come out of my mouth, something would malfunction.

By the time I got into Juilliard, I was working at a Target distribution warehouse. It didn't make anything, it just shipped things, and my job was just to stand there and look at the security codes on the back of trucks and see if they would lock, and check them in.

My wife changes the way that I dress. She makes me dress nicer than I want to dress. I feel like I perpetually dress like a 14-year-old boy, and she makes me stand up straight and wear clean clothes.

I'm constantly thinking about the role, and there's an infinite amount of questions you can ask yourself about a character to the point that it's hard to find the boundaries of when to not work.

Acting, to me, has been many things: It's a business, and it's a craft, and it's a political act - it's whatever adjective is most applicable.

The military community in particular, I think, could always be more supported, especially people who are being processed out of the military and trying to readjust to being civilians.

I originally passed on 'Girls' because I thought TV was evil.

There's something really exciting about playing someone where you're given license to be unpredictable.

The Marine Corps is some of the best acting training you could have. Having that responsibility for people's lives, suddenly time becomes a really valuable commodity and you want to make the most of it. And for acting, you just have to do the work, just keep doing it.

I'm one of those crazy people, if I'm watching the trailer for a movie and I'm really excited by it, I'll turn it off because I don't want to know anything. I want to be surprised because I love that more than knowing anything.

I don't feel like I have to dress up to go to the deli.

I don't really have foresight as an actor as far as career trajectory - I just stick to no-brainer situations.

How do you take what you do as seriously as possible but not so seriously that it ends up inhibiting what you do?

It was very clear to me I wanted to be an actor when I got out into civilian life.

There were definitely dark nights when you're like, 'Maybe joining the military wasn't such a good idea.' But, in a way, it was the best training to be an actor.

If I'm not doing something or working on something, I literally just sit in the room and think, which I don't think is productive. I won't go outside for days.

Even on your hiatus, you feel like you need to keep the character in the back of your brain.

I was in a mountain biking accident and broke my sternum about three months before my unit was supposed to deploy to Iraq, and it's such a close-knit community that the idea of not getting to go is hugely jarring, so I tried to get put back in training and wound up injuring it worse.

I mean, I did plays in high school, but I was convinced you couldn't make a living doing it.