MONDO EXTRAS

SR: I don't know if it helps, but it's nice.

WC: What was it like to film the first episode that you wrote?

SR: It was incredible! I couldn't believe it. It was like a dream come true. It was insane. By the time we shot it, it was a little while after I'd written it, so I'd kind of gotten used to it, a little more, I guess. But it was amazing! It turned out good, thank God, and the director, Greg [Mottola], did a bunch of other ones, and he's a really cool guy, and it was, overall, a great experience.

WC: So it's not like you were watching it and thinking, "That's not how I thought the line reading would go when I wrote it"?

SR: No! It got better. It always gets better. When you write a line and you think it's pretty funny, and then someone else does something that makes it really funny, it's great.

WC: How many episodes did you write, of the seventeen?

SR: I wrote one by myself, and then I co-wrote four others.

WC: Cool. And does it change your perspective as an actor on the show to know what goes into writing it?

SR: Yeah! Well, sometimes. It definitely changes my acting a lot just because I know I can change any one of my lines. A lot of times, acting is, like, making up for bad writing, like getting an awkwardly written line and having to come up with a natural-looking and -sounding way of saying something that no one would ever say in real life. So that is all avoided, which is an enormous step, because all the actors can tell me they don't like the line, or the other writers can tell me. It's a very open thing.

WC: It's fairly collaborative.

SR: They listen to everyone. No one's opinion is discredited.

WC: Definitely in the episodes that Jason Segel guest-starred in, it seems like there was a lot of ad-libbing.

SR: Yeah, they let him go nuts. It all depends on the director and the mood they're in. They let us improv a ton. Any time we think of something funny, they'll let us do it.

WC: You recently starred in your first movie, Donnie Darko.

SR: Yeah. I wouldn't say I "starred" in it!

WC: I won't pretend that I've seen it, because I watched out for it, but it never opened in Toronto.

SR: Actually, it didn't come out in Canada at all.

WC: What was it like making a movie, versus being on TV?