So where did you finally put down roots, and how did acting come into the fray?

There's a really great theater there called the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, which imports a lot of really great plays and actors from all over the country come to do repertory theater there. And so we would go see plays there. And then when I was a kid, there was an actor there who was teaching an acting class for kids. One day the guy pulled me aside and said that they were looking for a kid my age to do a play that the Master of Fine Arts students were doing and suddenly I was the go-to child actor for repertory theater.

How do we move from community theater to an FX show?

Long story short, four years at Juilliard, ended up getting really great representation right out of school and being thrust pretty quickly into the business of things. And for whatever reason, I was getting more callbacks and attention from the television side. Through that, both Rob [McElhenney] and Charlie [Day] were at the same agency. I ended up testing for That ‘80s Show with Charlie. I ended up getting a part, Charlie did not. But we got to know each other through that process. And Rob, I knew him just from [being] around. When he moved to L.A., he called me and said, "Hey, you want to hang out?" I remember doing a lot of screenplay readings at Charlie's apartment. We wanted to create our own material. But it was from a pure place, it wasn't from a place of desperate ambition. It was just like, we were creative people. We weren't going to wait for other people to give us permission to be creative, so we just started shooting our own stuff. And that's how Sunny came to be.

And the pilot of the show itself was a fully independent endeavor.

Yeah. And it was before YouTube or anything. It started as one scene. One idea. It was like, can you take something so dark and bring humor to it? And the idea was that a friend tells another friend, that he's not that close to, that he has cancer, and all the other guy wants to do is figure out a way to get the fuck out of there and not have to talk to him about it because it's uncomfortable.

So it just started as a scene. We had so much fun we expanded it into a short film of sorts. And then after we'd done it, we felt like we'd created characters that we wanted to do more with and we were like, "Maybe this is a show."

And now it's been a show for twelve seasons

Soon to be fourteen.

Let's pivot, for a moment, to A.P. Bio. I really like it.

So do I.

It made me laugh, which I don't tend to do at TV. You'll say a show's funny, but you're watching it with dead eyes–

We've all become a little cynical, haven't we?

How have you felt about a reception so far?

I'm happy with the reception. Actually, I'll tell you, when I first saw the pilot for A.P. Bio I thought I'd gone too far with it. I thought I'd made Jack Griffin too unlikeable. But then I watched it later. It works, and that's a tight line to walk, right? You've got a guy with almost entirely negative intentions as your protagonist for a show. That's a tough thing to pull off, and I knew it was going to be tough. But I was like, If we can pull it off though…