Donna Lynne Champlin

There's pre-production, and the second part is when you start rehearsal. Pre-production was a very large learning curve for me.

It's very rare for me to come across a script for NYMF that is truly its own animal. That's really what appealed to me about 'Valueville.' I still have my notes from when I first read it.

I was a judge for the 2014 NYMF season. I've done it for a few years. They send you a certain amount of scripts and scores, and you rank them.

My brother Mike is the hardest working person I know.

Phyllida Lloyd is probably the sweetest person on the planet.

Acting I never worried about, but it's so strange that on-camera work is so much more technical than theatre work, which I would have never thought in a million years.

Logistically, working on a television show and hitting your mark and leaning to your right and knowing where the camera is - I literally felt like I was on another planet.

'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' and Paula are alternatives to what we, as plus-size women in America, have been told is our narrative, which is, you should be hating yourself or hating others for how you look.

With shows with plus-sized characters, there are all of these lines of being jealous at so and so or mad at so and so for being skinny and their great diets. It's so all-encompassing and exhausting. I'm not saying that's not some women, but it's just not all of us.

I've had a lot of therapy in my life.

I've become accustomed to not being cast for television and film because of how I look.

I think with 'Hamilton,' Lin-Manuel has really blown up the whole casting idea. It's miraculous. You look at '1776,' it's a bunch of old white guys and old white chicks. You look at 'Hamilton,' and it's just the faces of America.

When Melissa McCarthy came out with 'Bridesmaids,' all of a sudden you saw a plus-sized woman who had three dimensions, was not an appendage, was pivotal to the plot.

One of the most amazing things about 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' is that every song is an original. There are no covers. I think 'Glee' had to deal with forcing covers into their plotlines. That can be difficult to pull off.

It's so much worse to live in regret in your forties than it is to take a chance in your late twenties.

I decided to make a CD that I would enjoy listening to. So I would finish a song and sit there, and I would say, 'What song, of all the songs I know, would I like to work on now? What song would make me happy?' And that's how I picked the songs.

No matter who you are, and no matter what you've accomplished, I have yet to meet someone who doesn't still feel like they're banging their head against some wall over something in their way.

About six months after I moved to New York City, I was literally down to my last twenty dollars when a friend of mine from college got me a job at an Upper East side gym. I ran the cafe, and I was the janitor. It was an unfortunate combination of duties, to say the least.

My first job ever was selling balloons with my brother at parades when I was about six years old. My father wanted us to learn about money, how to make it, save it, spend it, etc.

It seems the more I play Jane Austen, the more poetic my writing becomes. The other day, I left a Post-it note for my husband that had the word 'ergo' on it. I gotta rein it in before I get all full out Madonnannoying.