“Most of the time, my favorite drama has comedy in it as well. I think most good dramas have comedy in there. And all of the dramatic actors I look up to are also very funny.”

I have been in teen shows for years, so doing that stuff – kissing – is kind of commonplace and not a big deal. It was way more cool just because it was Meg Ryan.

I am super-proud to have a sort of famous character in my background that if you’re a certain age, he was probably a part of your youth. I think that’s pretty cool.

I do think that sometimes you can invent more palatable or digestible reasons versions or reasons, when perhaps you don’t want to admit the truth to yourself, and sometimes we deceive ourselves – along with others – about our reasons and motives.

Welcome to a life of insecurity and paralyzing self-doubt.

I wish I came from a more pure place. I don’t have something to say from the bottom of my soul. I just know how to take stuff I like and repackage it in a slightly different way.

Transitioning to being an unemployed film actor is different, but it’s fun and I’ve been looking forward to it for a while.

I started a band [Big Japan] for fun. These sticks break easily, but they feel good.

I like to always have humour in whatever I do.

It’s very important to me to love what I do. It was important to me to find a career that I truly enjoy. You can find something that sort of excites you, that’s half the battle of life.

You know, you’re a great barbecuetionist.

I started drinking Scotch just to be a man.

Comic books aren’t nerdy. You’d have to be an idiot to think computers are nerdy.

I just graduated from high school, and I was working at Blockbuster. Not only did I get into movies while I was there, but I was putting away boxes and looking at the kids on the covers. It felt like windows into these seemingly perfect lives.

I want to work with intelligent people and look for scripts that I think are intelligent and surprising.

Well, I guess most people would only know me from The O.C. I did a few episodes of Gilmore Girls before that. I was also a client on a lot of lawyer shows.

Any time you end a relationship, and everyone has ended plenty in their life, it’s always a tough thing and hard to get over.

Let go of the emotion and drama you create when you don’t get what you want. Just stay present and handle one situation at a time with an open mind and an open heart.

Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations.

At some point in time, you definitely have to go drama. Not to say that you’re going drama just because everybody else does it.

The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe.

Now I’d like someone to tell me there is no drama in real life!

The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim vision, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my mother’s angels and djinns.

I actually find in America, there’s a slight snobbery about actors who go back and forth between big heavy dramas and popcorn fare. That always intrigues me, because that doesn’t exist in the same way in Britain. And I imagine it would be worse.

In my first year at drama school, I did this kids’ show called ‘Let’s See.