TAYLOR: Did you spend a lot of your time at the library?

JONES: I don’t know if I’d say a lot but I would go to the library quite a bit. My mother and my brother and I would go twice a week usually and we would check out some of the VHS’s. Sometimes they had some comic books that were good. Usually it was the VHS’s of The Hardy Boys and Narnia and stuff like that. You would get some strange television that you haven’t heard of but that was popular in America in the ‘70s, you know? [laughs] They had the Tom Jones collection, the mini-series on VHS and I’m sure they had four copies of Titanic and stuff like that.

TAYLOR: I worked in a library once and I remember I would always watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer whenever it was on TV—

JONES: Oh shit! Sorry, my sheep just got in the barn. What were you saying?

TAYLOR: That I used to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on TV when it was on but I was so young that I don’t really remember. But then I started to work at a library and they had all of these old tapes and I would watch them again and I was like, “Dang, this show is actually so good.”

JONES: My theater teacher in high school was obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He said it was a brilliant show and the writing was incredible and, “Very few people understand the genius behind this show.” I never saw it but he loved it!

TAYLOR: Even with that rave review you never watched it?

JONES: [laughs] No and I should! He put me on to a lot of good stuff.

TAYLOR: What did he teach you?

JONES: He taught me all the textbook stuff about what a play is and what a drama is and what a tragedy is… And then he showed me—well, I’d already seen Citizen Kane [1941], but he was showing it to the class and he was like “He knows!” He showed me [Ingmar Bergman’s] The Seventh Seal [1957], which I had never seen before, which really, really, had an affect on me. And he showed me Double Indemnity [1944], which I’d never seen before and I wasn’t into film that much before then. I was turned on to a lot of great stuff.

TAYLOR: Were you in the theater productions at school or no?

JONES: I was in all the things that our class did, but I wasn’t in any of the big ones.

TAYLOR: Were you too cool?

JONES: No, I just didn’t get the parts.

TAYLOR: When you go back to Texas, you must get people that are like, “You’re so famous, I’ve seen you in the movies!” How does that feel?