As the director, it's just a constant stream of meetings where you meet with all of the creatives who make all of the decisions for every part of the episodes. You're also scouting for locations, deciding on the locations, meeting with your first associate director; mine was Jennifer Truelove. She's one of my favorite people on the planet.
My sister gave my two-and-a-half year old this book called 'And Tango Makes Three,' about the gay penguin couple at the Central Park Zoo. They cared for an orphan egg 'til it hatched and then raised the baby penguin as their own. I cannot get through this book without copious amounts of tears and snot running down my face.
What I love about Encores! is that it's a tremendous amount of work in a short amount of time, but it's just so festive and so celebratory and fun. It harkens back to the old days of just getting together and putting on a show.
'Hedwig' was the first audition my agent ever sent me on. I still have the slip of paper where I wrote down the appointment. I wrote down, 'Headwitch and the Angry Itch. Yitzhak. Croatian ex-drag queen billed as the last Jewess of the Balkans Krystal Nacht.'
I think we have a long way to go in the entertainment industry, particularly in movies, but I feel like in television, there's somebody is finally saying, 'Hey, women have stories to tell, and oddly enough, women want to hear them.'
I did ride a bike on the streets of Manhattan with four-and-a-half inch heels. Is that fun... or a death wish? You tell me. I was in severe pain, and everyone was laughing at me. That was great. I like when people laugh at me when I'm in pain.
Everything feels so personal when you're an actor because you're so open and vulnerable, and you have to trust your director to guide you to where the storytelling needs to go.
I do work really hard to be nice to people. Well, actually, I think it doesn't take much effort to be nice to people, so why shouldn't we all be nice to each other? But I do appreciate very much a woman who is in a position of power who is unapologetic about her position and her belief in her own abilities.
The thing I know about Diana Trout is that she's the hardest-working person. She even says it in season one - that nobody works harder than she does. I believe that's always been true about her. That is why she has high expectations of everyone around her.
We are in love with youth culture in this country... It permeates every aspect of people's lives.
I think about that with kids - you want to do everything for them, but you realize if you do everything, and you make it easy on them, they won't learn anything, and then they will walk around life needing their mamas all the time, and that isn't attractive.
I think that, as women, we're often asked to apologize for our own power, or we're asked to undercut ourselves, and it's deemed unattractive to have faith in our abilities.
You can't just wait for everybody to give you approval - you will just be waiting.
I like when an audience doesn't know what's going to happen to a character, and I like when I don't know. I'm learning, too - I don't get the script, like, until the last day.
That's what I love doing - understanding another person's perspective that's really different from mine. To me, it's like an emotional puzzle, trying to figure out the humanity of a character who is very different from myself and why they think the way they do.
My dad taught at the University of Melbourne. I visited Sydney another time. Then we went up to Cairns, then down the Great Ocean Road. I have friends from Perth, where I've never been, so I'd love to do that.
Eating good food is, to me, one of life's greatest joys, and I will never punish myself for it.
It really pisses me off when people look at women who are older and are not in a relationship as somehow sad or missing something, because they certainly don't look at men that way.
I always like to hang out with whoever's directing and watch what they do. I hang out at Video Village, the area where the directors and the writers and script advisors are.
I've been a fan of 'High Maintenance' since it was on Vimeo. My husband and I were obsessed with it. It's one of the best things ever made, period. It's a completely unique perspective.
