Jennifer Carpenter

I have learned that keeping my personal life outside of work is the easier, richer way to work.

It's fun to branch out a bit. I feel like I've held a lot of tricks up my sleeve for a lot of years, and 'Ex-Girlfriends' is a good way to show another side of me.

Well, I made an announcement to my family at 8 that I wanted to be an actor, and I focused like a laser beam on it. I never had a fallback plan.

I usually spend the hiatus of 'Dexter' in New York in a way to balance things.

At a very young age I was predicting outcomes, trying to take all the information and find the best route to wherever I was going. I avoided a lot of pitfalls because of that.

You know what, I'm happy to say that everything outside of 'Dexter' feels like a vacation, and I don't mean to say anything negative about the show. It's just a different kind of work. Emotionally it's taxing and complicated, and that's a great thing.

If you can create an environment where people are invited to do their best work and the best ideas always win, then the project itself will win.

It's sacred for an actor to keep their personal life personal.