It's Better To Be In

I've Never Cared About How Successful Or How Big I Was Going To Be. I Just Wanted To Be Part Of A Story That Affected People, Made Them Laugh Or Cry. To Me, That Was More Important Than Having My Face On Some Billboard.

I Really Saw Pat Brady, Kelsey Grammer's Character's Point Of View That It's A Business. It's Show Business. So, It Was An Incredible Opportunity To Work With Really Wonderful Creatives And The Script Was Fantastic. What Was So Interesting To Me About The Studio System Was That A Lot Of The Politics That Were In Play Then Are So Really Relevant To Today.

You Can't Please Everybody. There's That Old Saying That There's No Sure Formula For Success, But The Only Sure Fire Formula For Failure Is To Try To Please Everyone. You're Not Going To Do That.

I Very Comprehensively Studied Irving Thalberg And His Biographies. He's Who [scott] Fitzgerald Roughly Modeled The Character After. He Worked For Him, As A Writer, When He Was At Mgm. And, Of Course, I Revisited The Novel And The Politics Of Mgm And The Studio System At The Time And Familiarized Myself With The World. There Was A Great Deal Of Physical And Literary Work That Went Into It.

One Of The Many Things I Love About Working With Ryan Murphy Is That You're Always Thin-sliced In This Business. You Walk Into A Room And People Want You To Be How You Look Or How You're Perceived Or Whatever It Is In That 10 Minutes That Hey Meet You. I Think Ryan [murphy] Has An Intuition That Looks A Little Bit Deeper And Sees Things That Other People Might Not See In You - Sometimes You Might Not Even See In Yourself - But That He Knows Are There And That He Might Want To Get To Grow And Stretch With As An Actor.