When you're doing lots and lots of episodes and you're playing the same character, it's great because you really get to know the character and it becomes a really fast style and you find subtleties in it.
When you are acting, you are just one piece of the puzzle. You don't see how everything fits together. It feels like you have less authorship over the entire product. In directing, you take the entire picture into account, so you're challenged in a different way.
Technology has changed the fan/actor interaction quite a bit. Now it's really easy to communicate with a large group of people in a really short time, and that... opens a lot of possibilities. You can do a lot of things with it that you couldn't do before. It's kind of fun to figure out how that can be employed.
I was amazed by how much you have to think about as a director. As an actor, you don't have to think about much at all, as it turns out. It's very easy. And then when you step into the director's role, there's this whole universe of stuff that you have to pay attention to that's amazing to me.
I paid my way through college as a carpenter and a woodworker. So I've built the house I live in and most of the furniture that's in it, and I do a lot of woodworking still.
Directing is a lot of fun, but you have to be on your toes every minute. If you zone out for even a second, you'll miss something and things will get screwed up. And here's a little secret that I'm going to let out of the bag: That is not the case with acting.
A lot of times I think the cast members, the lead characters in a show really set the tone for the show. On some shows, the stars of the show will just be whining and complaining and spending the whole time texting their boyfriends on their Blackberries, and there's just no attention given to the work.
When the Haiti earthquake happened, I registered with UNICEF to set up an account, and posted to Twitter for people to donate to it. In a matter of a couple of hours, $30,000 had been donated. That, to me, was eye-opening.
I think there are presences out there that we can't see or directly communicate with that have benevolent influence on us. Whether they're angels or something else, I'm not sure.
I'm one of those people that thinks the world changes in smaller and in more mysterious ways than a lot of people like to think. A lot of traditional charities and organizations do things that on the surface seem like a good idea, but it doesn't change the way that people think about interacting with other people.
I actually think that the most efficacious way of making a difference is to lead by example, and doing random acts of kindness is setting a very good example of how to behave in the world.
When I was in high school, I liked to pretend that I was a Russian foreign exchange student. I would do things like go into a pizza restaurant and tell them I'd never had pizza before, and they'd bring me into the kitchen and show me how to make an American pizza. It's really fun.
