Governments are different, and philosophies are different, but when it comes down to it, a schoolteacher is a schoolteacher is a schoolteacher. A butcher is a butcher is a butcher. We are people. And we are far more common than we ever imagine.

I love comedy. I love the absurdity of it. I love the kind of intelligence that's required to be dumb in comedy.

I was 15 when Chernobyl happened, I've been vaguely thinking about it for most of my life. But somewhere around 2015, it occurred to me that I didn't know how it happened, which seemed like a pretty bizarre lapse in my understanding of the world and how it functions.

In the case of 'Chernobyl,' we're telling a story of a government that runs on lies the way cars run on fuel, and there are people who ultimately end up paying the price for those lies - and a certain culture of denial is in place, and the degradation of expertise is in place.

How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism.

I have to say that one person I learned from the most as an actor in my life is Emmy Rossum. She is so insanely talented in the sense that when watching her work, it just turns into watching her speak - it's no longer acting; that's how good she is! She just becomes the person.

We can think so much about life and take ourselves so seriously; I mean, I like to tell people, 'Don't take life too seriously' because you'll cloud the experience. That's what the meaning of life is to me - being able to enjoy the moment.

Hope is a feeling that life and work have meaning. You either have it or you don't, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you.