You’ve been acting for most of your life. Did you always know that you wanted to act?
You know, I always liked it, and I always thought I was okay at it. And so I started doing theater here in New York when I was young. But at that point, it was still like a glorified hobby, almost. It was like, you know, I loved to play basketball and I loved acting. They were kind of on equal levels.… Growing up, I always thought being an actor meant being in theater here in New York, really. I thought movies were like in LA and at that age all the movies I saw were, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, and I thought, I am not going to be toting a bazooka. That doesn’t feel like me. And then it all started to change and I started to figure out what I liked, and what I wanted to do.

You’ve gotten a lot of incredible roles after the success of Little Miss Sunshine, such as the two brothers in There Will Be Blood. How do you choose which characters you’ll play?
Well, you know it’s constantly changing. The older you get, you start to think about your career more, things change. But for the most part I’m pretty much a gut-response guy. If I read something and I like it, that’s an exciting feeling. And if you read something and you don’t like it or you don’t get it or it’s just not, you know, maybe I’ll torture myself for like two weeks, “should I do this, should I not?” But it usually goes back to what that gut feeling was…. I wish there was, like, a sort of technique or a clear-cut way.