'Getting On' - that show, it broke my heart. It really was like the greatest love of my life. I'm forever changed by it.
— Alex Borstein
My rhetoric degree ended up being very helpful in advertising. I got an internship and then figured I will be a copywriter; that will be my path.
When I was doing stand-up, there were a lot of things I talked about that seemed very silly but were therapeutic.
The hardest thing in the world to depict dramatically is stand-up.
Stand-up's hard. It's one of the hardest things in the world, and it's really lonely.
I don't want pictures of my kids anywhere. I don't tweet pictures of my kids. I don't put them on any social media. I definitely do like to keep some privacy that way. And mostly, it's fear-based; people are crazy.
If you believe in romance, and if you believe in marriage, you also have to believe in divorce. It's like, with 'Getting On,' a lot of people say, 'I don't want to watch that. It's so dark.' But you can't just want to go to weddings and children's birthday parties. You've got to witness it all.
Being an outsider helps breed comedy.
I love the freedom of voice-over and the ability to play multiple characters I could never play in real life: a hot young woman, a little boy.
I have no point in my system or morals where I say, 'This is too far.'
I got my degree in rhetoric.
My uncle is a hemophiliac, and my brother is one as well. I am a carrier, and it's a disease that my kids also deal with. It's something that has affected my family and I for so long, and I think it's actually what drove me to comedy as a means to cope during tough times.
I always loved performing, but my parents were very practical, middle-class Jewish people.
I've always felt like an outsider as a woman. I've never really felt wholly comfortable in a women's world or woman's things. I've never been conventionally pretty or thin or girly-girl. Never felt dateable. All I've seen on TV has never felt like mine.
As an actor, you create your own ideas.
I was kind of the comic relief in my household. We had a chronic illness in the family. And so, a lot of emergency room visits, and my role was to be silly and add levity, and we're Jewish. So every Passover is a performance. You kind of learn to role play and do voices at the Passover Seder.
I still get very uncomfortable and flushed on the street if somebody recognizes me or stops me. I don't know what to say. It's uncomfortable and strange.
Losing my grandmother was one of the hardest things I ever had to go through.
People who have picture-perfect upbringings and lives tend not to be funny. I don't think they write from a position of pain.
I think I was born because my parents had two boys and wanted to give it one more go and try for a girl... they got me instead.
Usually, impersonations come out of something you dig, because you're listening to it over and over. And you kind of start developing... You're really trying to emulate them, then you realize, 'I sound ridiculous doing this. Oh, hey, maybe this is a funny impersonation.'
Every comic is really a frustrated rock star.
Animation is very similar to sketch comedy: you have a short amount of time to do something big and ridiculous and funny.
I never became a road comic.
I'm terrible at learning lines. I'm good at learning lines when I don't have to be word-perfect.
I've spent most of my life writing and developing everything that I've wanted to be in - which is why I started writing in the first place.
Amy Sherman-Palladino is very funny. She's got just natural timing and comedic instinct. And she writes in a comedic rhythm.
'Getting On' is just the coolest experience ever, and working with people like Laurie Metcalf, that's the joy. That's what I love about it.
I grew up with a grandmother from another country and having a different language in my house. That gave me an ear for accents.
My dad was raised Orthodox in Atlanta. He speaks Hebrew. He speaks Yiddish. He married a Jewish woman who is not Orthodox, so I was brought up by two different kinds of Jews.
I'm still auditioning and doing other movie parts, but I really like the developing and the writing. You have more control over your destiny.
Television and film acting is really fun because you are working with other people and you are not completely responsible for the outcome of the project.
