Andrew Rannells

I love doing both theater and television.

Even though I'm from the Midwest, the majority of my life has been spent on the coasts where being gay wasn't really much of a conversation.

Surround yourself with people who are going to support you regardless of what your sexual orientation is, and you can have a beautiful life filled with love.

I've certainly played those leading man or male juvenile roles, where you're not supposed to make people laugh.

I've always been a huge fan of Tina Fey's. She's a very unique storyteller and has such a great voice and sense of character and comedy, and manages to do things that are oftentimes very broad but still have a lot of heart to them.

I was a little boy who watched 'Solid Gold' every week and wanted to be a 'Solid Gold' dancer. And I would do very in-depth reenactments of 'Grease 2' and 'West Side Story' with my sister Natalie in our garage. I was a very theatrical kid.

My group of friends, we sort of go at each other pretty hard sometimes. And it's half performance, half truth that you can say cutting things to your friends that might be a little true, but as long as you package it in a joke, it becomes a little more palatable.

I used to do community theater with Conor Oberst.

Coming to New York to go to school and being very far away from my own family, I definitely found myself piecing together my sort of chosen family here, and I have friends that I'm still very close with, that we all met at the same time and have become a huge part of each other's lives.

Luckily for me I have a very supportive family and a loving group of friends.

One of the great things about 'Girls' is that each of these characters really does represent a human being. There are definitely relatable aspects to all of these folks, and certainly within my close friend group, those personalities very much exist.

I had to be clean-shaven all the time to play a Mormon missionary, so after I was done, I grew a mustache out of rebellion. It was actually very polarizing. I became attractive to a completely new group of people and also repulsive to a new group of people. The lesson: mustaches are divisive.