Pushing boundaries has long been of interest to Wittrock, who caught the acting bug at a young age — thanks, in no small part, to his father, an actor and a voice teacher. Eventually, summers at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, led Wittrock to L.A. County High School for the Arts. "That's when I started studying acting and couldn't turn back," he said. "I've always known it's sort of the only thing I could do."

After graduating from LACHSA, Wittrock was accepted to the Juilliard School in New York City, the training ground for some of Hollywood's most acclaimed stars. And less than a year after completing his Juilliard education, Wittrock was cast on All My Children, where he played the nefarious Damon Miller for nearly three years. "Juilliard was so theater-focused and great, but I feel like the soap was my boot camp training for camera acting because it's so different," he said. "Film and television are so piecemeal. You do one scene and then you put it to bed and then you do a scene that comes before. In a play, you have to go from beginning to end every night, and that's harder, but also more fulfilling, in a way."

That's why, at the end of his All My Children contract, Wittrock returned to the stage as Happy Loman in Mike Nichols' acclaimed 2012 Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman. "A lot of the stuff that's happening now, I can trace back to Death of a Salesman," he said, very matter-of-factly. "Francine Maisler, the casting director, saw Death of a Salesman and called me in for Unbroken. The casting director of Normal Heart had seen Salesman too. I look back on it now and it's like one thing led to another; it was a chain reaction."

Following The Normal Heart, Ryan Murphy — a writer, director, and producer known for creating an unofficial company of resident actors with whom he works — added Wittrock to his troupe and cast him as Dandy in the fourth season of American Horror Story. Though the role has become one of the year's most noteworthy, it wasn't initially designed that way.

"The part was not supposed to be as huge as it became," Wittrock said, exhaling a literal sigh of relief. "It was supposed to be six to eight episodes, but on day one, [Ryan] was like, 'Do you want this to be a series regular, because I have a lot of ideas for Dandy and we're really excited about where this character will go.' I was like, 'Yeah!' But I had no idea what was coming."