In many ways, Danny Castellano on The Mindy Project is the typical Chris Messina character: rough around the edges but sweet underneath it all. Over the course of the show's two seasons, however, Messina has been able to watch Danny grow — as Messina himself has stepped out of his comfort zone.

The Mindy Project felt very scary to do, which again, is a good sign. There was something good about doing it. It was never a world — if you told me, "You're going to be entering your third season of a Fox comedy," I'd be like, "That's never gonna happen." And not because I thought I was better than it, just because I didn't grow up wanting that, and I don't feel like I have that skill. I'm really happy that Mindy [Kaling] saw something in me that she felt was right for this part and right for the show. And I've learned a lot about comedy from all those guys. It's a very, very funny bunch of people.

I struggle with it, because what I like to do and the style in which I like to work is quiet, a lot of silences and a lot of pauses. It's 20 minutes of television so it's like, let's go, let's go, let's go, and that's where the comedy comes out, some of the quick pace of it. So I struggle sometimes with maybe the form of it, but I've learned to really, really respect it and admire when people can do it well.

There are so many actors that you'll sit down with — and there are so many actors that you probably will never meet — that are so talented and they can't get an agent, they can't get a job, they can't get a callback. They can't get a callback for a fucking pilot. They can't get in the room. I know a lot of these people, and they blow me away, and they blow so many other actors away. And we may not know who they are ever. I'm lucky to have a job. For two seasons, now entering into a third, between The Mindy Project and The Newsroom, to have these very, very two different characters, these very, very two different sets, I'm super lucky to have work.

So we started out by saying, "Yeah, it's exhausting. I don't sleep much, and I'm going from one thing to the next," but in the big scheme of things, the fact that I can go and know that tonight I'm gonna go shoot this Joe Swanberg movie, and know that next week I'm going back on The Newsroom, and in July I have a job on The Mindy Project — it's a nice feeling because that might go away, easily. And it definitely hasn't been here forever. There were many days where I didn't know what the hell I was gonna do.