I've started to get more stage fright the older I get.
— Ari Graynor
I've already put my parents through the wringer with a number of my jobs!
Onstage was where I felt the most confident and in control and free, and as I've gotten older, it's gotten more and more daunting. And I think that's also part of my desire to keep confronting that and pushing through to find that childlike or youthful ignorance against fear and keep at it.
I think it's important to have goals and to have dreams, but you also have to live in the moment of what the reality is.
I think most people have experienced that at some point: being on one end or the other of a super-unbalanced relationship.
A lot of entertainment, and especially in a half-hour format, can be all jokes, all the time. And some of those jokes can be really, really funny, but what I respond to, as a viewers, is identification or caring about the characters.
I want the power that comes from expressing myself creatively and putting something back into the world. Being someone's muse would be flattering, but it could get old fast.
In high school, everyone told me I had a great personality and sense of humor, but I wanted to be the girl who boys liked because she was pretty on top of being funny. I was boy crazy.
Sitting around with Jim Carrey, coming up with bits, is, like, beyond a dream come true.
I played a lot of dress-up in my room. I really liked being alone. I had a lot of friends, but I had an only-child, live-in-my-head personality.
Usually, when I'm at a festival with a movie that I'm in, I'm in and out in 24 hours.
No one's up in arms about these PG-13 movies where it's literally about the end of the world.
Comedy is funny when it comes from truth, and that's always the rule of them. It's about how far you can push that boundary.
It took me a solid four or five years to feel really comfortable in front of the camera.
My mom was in the chorus of 'Hello Dolly' and 'The Worldly Players'; my dad would build the set.
Numb3rs' was a wonderful gift because I had not worked in six months. It was so fun to be on that set doing these crazy things.
Regardless of what kind of film, the number one rule of comedy is to never take yourself too seriously and then the next rule is you can't have any self-consciousness, otherwise it kills the laugh, and that will never change.
It's an incredible thing when you are creating something in a moment with the other people on stage and with an audience, and you are all experiencing it together as it exists in that one night. It's a magical feeling.
The worst thing you can have as an actor is too big an ego. It just kills creativity.
I love being onstage. As I've gotten older, it terrifies me more and more, which is interesting.
It shouldn't be an issue that we have a black president. Gay marriage shouldn't be an issue. And women being funny shouldn't be an issue.
I was the kind of kid that always loved babies. I was, you know, four years old, and I would have my baby doll that I would bring with me everywhere and fake breastfeed on the beach and diaper.
When you look at all of the male characters on television and in film, it's not like every one of them are the people doing the right thing that you can point to as your own moral compass. We need to have all kinds of characters represented.
While I appreciate horror movies, I'd love the opportunity to do something transformative, especially because people see me as contemporary. There's a lot to explore in my career that could take me back to another time. A period piece would be an incredible game of dress-up, too.
You can only really hear the beat of your own drum if you give yourself the space to sit in it.
I was the girl who got out of my athletic requirement by managing the boys' sports teams. Which is pretty ingenious, because when I was a sophomore, I got a prom date out of it. That was really strong planning on my part.
I feel like I'm sort of afraid to study too much because I feel like I work as I go, but I want to study the classics and also the technical aspects of things. I'm always looking to understand more.
I'm an only child, and in college, I was given a single, and then I lived with people for, like, two years but were my best friends, and we had a really fun time. And then I lived alone or with a boyfriend. I've never really had a bad roommate situation.
I started acting because it was essentially the way I needed to survive and equalize my inner life.
When you're having a good time working on something, and you all like each other, it shows in ways that you don't even realize.
You look at Richard Pryor and Robert Klein and George Carlin and Richard Lewis - those guys were so smart, they were the thinking-man stand-ups.
You can't please everybody. All you can do is please yourself.
The Bowery Hotel is always a great place to meet people for drinks. It's so cozy in there, especially in the late fall and winter.
I was a precocious only child, and then I went through a fat, awkward stage for several years, so I learned to fall back on my humor and personality when I was growing up. It's how you survive, so I think it was more of a natural progression for me, developing into comedy.
On stage, you have nothing to hide behind. It allows the work to live in a more organic place. It's almost like a meditation. You have to go on that stage and be as present as possible.
I was a highly sensitive kid, sort of an old soul, and I felt like a lot of people in my peer group didn't fully understand me, or I couldn't fully be myself. I just wasn't engaged in a way that was fulfilling me.
All we can do in life is push through the things that make us afraid and try to be better.
It is frustrating that people have a hard time telling other female stories besides, 'Is she going to get the guy?'
There's a certain truism that you can't be self-conscious in comedy.
I started acting when I was seven, so I've read my share.
I prefer situational or character-based humor to gross-out gags and comedic set pieces.
I've had curly hair for years, and I never wore it curly. I didn't know what to do with it.
I was made fun of for being fat from fourth or fifth grade to eighth grade. That was pretty rough.
I've done a bunch of Broadway, so I'm a theater nerd when I come to New York.
Not one person has ever sent me a drink because I was Caroline in 'Nick and Norah.' People reference it; people say really nice things about it, but I was sure I would be getting more free drinks.
For years, I said I didn't want to do television. It was just a hard 'no.' I didn't want to read anything. It didn't matter what it was - it was just 'no.'
I had been doing theater since I was a kid, so the stage really felt like home to me. It felt like the place where I trust myself the most in the world and felt the most confident.
For all creative people, that's sort of everyone's journey. You feel something inside, and it takes a while to figure out what that looks like and what your voice is.
I would love to be doing more voice-over work. It's such a fun and free playground to take risks, play around, and get sort of ridiculous.
The language can be different, but the emotional lives are the same no matter whether you're doing Shakespeare or Stoppard or something else... The emotional life is all the same.
