It's a challenge to turn a book series into a television series; you need to keep people on their toes, but you also want to be true to the source material.
In some ways, it's easier to be the lead. Week after week, scene after scene, the rhythms of filming force you to peel away a certain amount of artifice. When you're on set that much, there's a license to let the character emerge from the work itself.
Working outdoors in the Delacorte Theater is always challenging.
In this new world where art is willfully misinterpreted to score points and to distract, simply doing the work of an artist has become a political act.
A play is not a tweet. It can't be compressed and embedded, and it definitely can't be delivered apologetically.
The very act of saying anything more nuanced than 'us good, them bad' is under attack, and I'm proud to stand with artists who do.
My parents met when they were 16 and bonded over the antiwar movement.
You can make bad writing 'OK,' but... you really need to start with a good script and with characters that are three-dimensional and with great dialogue. It's a difficult lesson to learn because good writing is hard to come by, but it's definitely worth chasing.
Good writing is everything.
After college, I was an intern at the New York Theater Workshop. In the mornings, I would build sets and hang lights, and in the afternoon, I would be the reader for auditions.
If I could grill for breakfast, I would.
Growing up, I used to babysit, but, thinking back on what I was like at 15, this was probably a terrible idea.
When you're in a theater, it's about reaching the back rows. When you have a camera in your face, it's just about knowing the size of the room.
What's really fun as the villain is working to get the audience to hate you.
I think, sometimes, actors having a holistic view of what they're in can be overrated. Especially when you're playing somebody as narcissistic and self-involved as Ernest Hemingway, it doesn't really matter what else is in the script.
