Ari Graynor
I played a lot of dress-up in my room. I really liked being alone. I had a lot of friends, but I had an only-child, live-in-my-head personality.
Part of doing good work is caring deeply about it, believing in what you're doing, and getting incredibly attached to the characters that you're playing, the stories you're telling, and the people you're working with.
The only thing that I'm not willing to do is really stupid, horribly written sitcoms. It can be tempting during pilot season time, but I realized this a while ago when I almost signed my life away to a stupid pilot.
I did babysit a little bit when I was young. I prefer babysitting for babies. I always loved babies. I was not as great with kids that wanted to be entertained and that wanted to talk.
I was more of the kind of babysitter that liked holding the baby, sort of playing Mom, and then putting the baby to bed and watching TV while eating everything in their kitchen.
I think the world of comedy is a relatively small community, and especially for women in comedy, there just aren't that many people involved.
Working with David Gordon Green, and Jonah Hill, and Michael Cera, and Drew Barrymore, and all of those people - those are the best people in comedy to work with. Anna Faris. You know, that's my goal, to keep learning and to just keep working with the best people I can. And yeah, we do all hang out, and we all kind of know each other.
I would love to be in 'Downton Abbey.' That's the thing I thing many people would have a good laugh with me saying anything like that. I feel like that's the next phase of my career. To reprove to everyone that I can do things besides the crazy characters.
Twitter's a lot of work! That's the first thing I would say. There's so much pressure to be funny.
There's pressure to come up with something genius every time. I feel like I keep letting myself down with my Twitter posts. I have to start keeping a journal of rough drafts of prophetic ideas about the world.
Regardless of what kind of film, the number one rule of comedy is to never take yourself too seriously and then the next rule is you can't have any self-consciousness, otherwise it kills the laugh, and that will never change.
The language can be different, but the emotional lives are the same no matter whether you're doing Shakespeare or Stoppard or something else... The emotional life is all the same.
The Bowery Hotel is always a great place to meet people for drinks. It's so cozy in there, especially in the late fall and winter.
Numb3rs' was a wonderful gift because I had not worked in six months. It was so fun to be on that set doing these crazy things.
I would love to be doing more voice-over work. It's such a fun and free playground to take risks, play around, and get sort of ridiculous.
You can't please everybody. All you can do is please yourself.
My mom was in the chorus of 'Hello Dolly' and 'The Worldly Players'; my dad would build the set.
For all creative people, that's sort of everyone's journey. You feel something inside, and it takes a while to figure out what that looks like and what your voice is.
You look at Richard Pryor and Robert Klein and George Carlin and Richard Lewis - those guys were so smart, they were the thinking-man stand-ups.
It took me a solid four or five years to feel really comfortable in front of the camera.
I had been doing theater since I was a kid, so the stage really felt like home to me. It felt like the place where I trust myself the most in the world and felt the most confident.
When you're having a good time working on something, and you all like each other, it shows in ways that you don't even realize.
Comedy is funny when it comes from truth, and that's always the rule of them. It's about how far you can push that boundary.
For years, I said I didn't want to do television. It was just a hard 'no.' I didn't want to read anything. It didn't matter what it was - it was just 'no.'
I started acting because it was essentially the way I needed to survive and equalize my inner life.
No one's up in arms about these PG-13 movies where it's literally about the end of the world.
Not one person has ever sent me a drink because I was Caroline in 'Nick and Norah.' People reference it; people say really nice things about it, but I was sure I would be getting more free drinks.
I'm an only child, and in college, I was given a single, and then I lived with people for, like, two years but were my best friends, and we had a really fun time. And then I lived alone or with a boyfriend. I've never really had a bad roommate situation.
Usually, when I'm at a festival with a movie that I'm in, I'm in and out in 24 hours.
I've done a bunch of Broadway, so I'm a theater nerd when I come to New York.
I feel like I'm sort of afraid to study too much because I feel like I work as I go, but I want to study the classics and also the technical aspects of things. I'm always looking to understand more.
I was made fun of for being fat from fourth or fifth grade to eighth grade. That was pretty rough.
I was the girl who got out of my athletic requirement by managing the boys' sports teams. Which is pretty ingenious, because when I was a sophomore, I got a prom date out of it. That was really strong planning on my part.
Sitting around with Jim Carrey, coming up with bits, is, like, beyond a dream come true.
I've had curly hair for years, and I never wore it curly. I didn't know what to do with it.
You can only really hear the beat of your own drum if you give yourself the space to sit in it.
In high school, everyone told me I had a great personality and sense of humor, but I wanted to be the girl who boys liked because she was pretty on top of being funny. I was boy crazy.
I prefer situational or character-based humor to gross-out gags and comedic set pieces.
While I appreciate horror movies, I'd love the opportunity to do something transformative, especially because people see me as contemporary. There's a lot to explore in my career that could take me back to another time. A period piece would be an incredible game of dress-up, too.
I want the power that comes from expressing myself creatively and putting something back into the world. Being someone's muse would be flattering, but it could get old fast.
I started acting when I was seven, so I've read my share.
When you look at all of the male characters on television and in film, it's not like every one of them are the people doing the right thing that you can point to as your own moral compass. We need to have all kinds of characters represented.
A lot of entertainment, and especially in a half-hour format, can be all jokes, all the time. And some of those jokes can be really, really funny, but what I respond to, as a viewers, is identification or caring about the characters.
There's a certain truism that you can't be self-conscious in comedy.
I was the kind of kid that always loved babies. I was, you know, four years old, and I would have my baby doll that I would bring with me everywhere and fake breastfeed on the beach and diaper.
I think most people have experienced that at some point: being on one end or the other of a super-unbalanced relationship.
It is frustrating that people have a hard time telling other female stories besides, 'Is she going to get the guy?'
It shouldn't be an issue that we have a black president. Gay marriage shouldn't be an issue. And women being funny shouldn't be an issue.
I think it's important to have goals and to have dreams, but you also have to live in the moment of what the reality is.