I always suspected that she was the biggest influence on me. It seems unlikely, but I always suspected that. I used to say that in interviews, and people would think I was just being smart and evasive. But I reread Jane Eyre recently, and also Villette , her other great novel. I just came across episode after episode where I thought “Oh my goodness, I just ripped that off from this book!” Perhaps you wouldn’t recognize it, but I did. Certain kinds of techniques, certain moments when you understand that the narrator is crying, not because she tells you, but because somebody watching her makes a remark. All these little things that I thought, “Oh, I used that in that book,” or “Oh, that trick.” I think Charlotte Brontë had an enormous influence on me, and I think it’s something to do with that use of first-person and the evasiveness, the indirectness, of her first-person narrative. I mean this phrase, “the unreliable narrator,” has become very popular in creative writing. So it’s not quite that, but a very subtle use of the relationship between the writer and the book and the reader — something I tuned in on, I homed in on instantly, when I started to read Charlotte Brontë. But I’ll tell you, my favorite author — novelist — is somebody who you probably wouldn’t think had any relationship to me, which is Dostoyevsky. I’ve always loved Dostoyevsky, ever since I first read him. I think he’s one of the reasons I started to read, you know, when I read Crime and Punishment when I was about 17 or 18. Dostoyevsky and Chekhov for me remain like two poles in terms of a way to approach things. I love the messiness of Dostoyevsky, the improvised — I mean a lot of it is a mess, but I like the way that strange, unexpected things have obviously come tumbling out of him that he didn’t want to necessarily have come tumbling out. On the other hand, you know, Chekhov, another great Russian writer, exemplifies the calm, controlled, very carefully structured, understated kind of work. I aspire to them both. They’re two of my great heroes.

It is usually 4 or 5 in the morning so I go downstairs and make tea and then read a bit of poetry – Mary Oliver, Rumi, Hafiz, Seamus Heaney, Yeats, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Rilke are among my favorites…

Well absolutely Sondheim was an influence, because he was in many ways this door into the world of theater and he is a phenomenal composer. He’s also a phenomenal mentor.

Growing up, it was the music, the style, it was what you saw, what you read, what you looked at, the vernacular that influenced you the most. I carried that, it was so important to me.

Yes. Although I acted early on, I always wanted to be a painter.

I used to use the brush before that time before 2015, but then I gave it up for a while. Now I’m back on the brush, so that’s the truth.

Whenever we went out to dinner or a party, especially when I had a temper tantrum, drawing was the remedy of choice. It only calmed me down. [Laughs] It still does.

I know what I’m doing when I’m doing it but I almost don’t know what I’m doing when I’m doing it.

I don’t want my children to look at Netflix and see me on screen in the arms of someone who’s not their dad.

That was scary because I am afraid of guns.