You tweeted that you’re putting your career in jeopardy with “Cardinal.” Why?

I think my career is in trouble because all careers are always in trouble. It’s an ebb and flow of stuff. You’ve got to take a realistic look at the stuff that you’ve done and made and not all my things have been super successful, so that’s where the joke comes from.

Seriously, what is your level of nervousness right now?

My level of nervousness is high. I’m not a super nervous guy in general. I don’t live a ton of my life in my head. Every day, working on this is like being in Europe. Things are just slightly off and you have an intuition of how it would work but you don’t know. You still know how to exist but it’s just everything is a little bit different. ‘The outlets are different. O.K., I just have to get a new adapter.’ Everything takes a little more time, so it makes me nervous.

You’ve focused primarily on sitcoms and indie films in the last several years, so why suddenly turn to theater?

I’m turning 36 and I really want to be good. I really want to be good at what I do. I’ve been doing this for like 10 years and when you start out it’s a passion and it’s fun and it’s kind of loose, the way I viewed it. Jobs would come and go and I knew that stuff would be there and not be there. And I just hit this point where I felt like I really wanted to be really good. And I didn’t know how to do that.

You don’t think you were good on “Happy Endings” and “The Mindy Project”?

I think I am good but I think I can be better. You only have a short time to do all this stuff because of your age. Everything is constantly changing. I really wanted to make sure that I was thought of as one of the best. I think the only way to do that is to start making sure that you’ve touched everything.