Every time an Oscar is given out, an agent gets his wings.

For a long time I did not want to do television because I did not want to get stuck playing the same person. I wanted the ongoing challenge of a variety of roles.

I look for a role that hopefully I feel empathy with and that I can understand and love, but also that has that challenge for me to play - a different kind of role, a different type of character, a different time period.

[Bates had explored some of the themes of the story — depression, overcoming fears — before. Marriage, however, was newer territory.] It's always presented either as the romance or the tragedy, ... We don't look too often at what marriage really is. Marriage masks thousands of different arrangements — behind the scenes, it's all about change and negotiation and compromise. But we have the same attitudes toward marriage that we have toward death and dying — we want to sanitize it.

There's only maybe two pages in Jane's book that deals with the marriage because she was really talking only about her becoming an EMT and going through this midlife crisis, ... So when Alan Hines wrote the screenplay, he sat down with Michael Stern and really got down to the bottom of what was going on in that relationship. The work was there in the script.

I'm not that conservative. I do feel - I guess I'm more of a Democrat at heart, although I've never affiliated myself with a particular party.