■ When I met Tracy Letts, I was a very young non-Equity actor in Chicago. I wasn’t making any money. And then he wrote these incredible plays and let me be a part of them. Killer Joe. Bug. They’re huge. Frankly, without those plays, I don’t know what would have happened. I don’t know if I would have found my way out of Chicago.

■ I was at New Trier my freshman and sophomore years. Up until then, I had lived in Kentucky with my mom. So it was a massive shift from the little schools I’d been going to. I walked in and didn’t know a soul. Thousands of kids. I was a real loner for a while. The kids didn’t have much use for some weird dude who just appeared out of nowhere. From the time I was 12 to 16, those years were pretty arduous. I had a lot of big feelings. A lot of trauma, a lot of pain. But I liked going there because they did a lot of plays and musicals and had theater classes. I never got a big part in anything, but it’s where I started messing around with acting. You put those feelings onstage and people find that compelling.

■ I was a patron in the little diner in Groundhog Day, so I got to spend all this time watching Bill Murray just endlessly revising scenes and coming up with stuff out of thin air and making everybody laugh. There was just so much joy in it. It was a beautiful thing to witness. A lot of people think that the real heavy lifting in acting is being dramatic. But to elevate a room like that just on your wit is more impressive to me than sitting there sobbing.

■ Sometimes people see me and their initial reaction is sort of suspicion. I feel like that’s because they’re trying to sort out how they know me. In that moment they’re perplexed, and they seem almost annoyed. Then once they figure it out, they seem pleasantly surprised. The thing I mostly hear is, “You’re that actor.”

■ George Jones was just some guy I used to see on Hee Haw when I was a little boy. That was the extent of my knowledge of him until doing George & Tammy. Such a fascinating, tragic, beautiful human being who ultimately seemed to find some redemption later in life. No matter how much of a train wreck your life might be up to a certain point, you can hit the brakes and change tracks and make something of yourself.

■ Music is sacred to me. A lot of times I get ready for performances, particularly onstage, by listening to it. Jazz is probably the eye of the pyramid as far as music goes. It’s just so present. The people who make it, when they’re improvising, they’re so revealing of themselves and their struggles and their joys. It never ceases to amaze me.

■ People consider acting to be an ego-driven profession, but the longer you do it, the more you realize that it’s really not about being in the spotlight. It’s about trying to understand people. I’m not saying I’m some avatar of human behavior; I still have my own foibles. But there’s an evolution that I can see from when I started doing this work till now, and that’s been the journey of understanding that it’s not about me. My job is to disappear.