- You great up
in Amish country. - I did.
- What was that like? - It was pretty crazy.
- Yeah? - My house growing up was
in between two Amish fields. - Like, like
how much land between-- To me, it sounds like Utopia. It sounds like just land
and not that many cars and-- - Yeah, it was very idyllic. There was Amish buggies
on the road. And my dad's side of
the family is Mennonite, and so my grandmother
had Mennonite women that would work in her garden,
and I would drive them home. - Now what do they dress like? What do the Mennonites
dress like? Like the Amish? - Mennonites are sort of
like watered-down Amish. So Mennonites, they, uh-- they wear sort of just
normal, like, plain clothes, jeans and sneakers and stuff. But the Amish are full-on, you know, coverings
and everything. - Right.
- Yeah. - Wow.
- Yeah. - And so you, uh-- So lots of land and animals
and stuff like that? - Yeah, my dad actually trains
and races horses for a living. And so--
- There? - Yeah, yeah,
in Amish country. - Wow. - And races around Pennsylvania
and New York, and so I grew up, yeah,
around a lot of animals. - And you had goats. - We had goats,
and we didn't just have any-- any, like, regular
kind of goats. We had fainting goats. - Have y'all heard of-- Do you know what
fainting goats are? [cheers and applause]
- Yeah? There's some fans. - It's such a strange thing. - It is.
It really is strange. When you--when,
like, they're scared by an animal running by
or a person, they freeze and fall over. I don't know why. - It's the weirdest thing. - It's really weird. - And how long
do they stay down? - They stay down for,
I would say, a good, like, 30 seconds,
maybe more. - Wow.
- Yeah. - That's just
the weirdest thing. - It is the weirdest-- - I mean, possums play dead,
which is very clever. - Yeah. - To avoid getting eaten
by their predator. And for--
But to be that, like-- Oh! - I know. I know.
[laughter] It seems like
the opposite reaction you'd want to have
to a predator. - Yeah, you'd want to run
as fast as-- Then you'd give them a chance
to eat you for 30 seconds. - Exactly.
- It's really dangerous. - Yeah.
- Oh, man. And so your parents, they were
not Amish or Mennonite? - My dad was Mennonite.
He grew up Mennonite, yeah. - Okay, but they were--
And is that-- Forgive me for my ignorance.
- That's okay. - But can you listen to music
and watch TV and stuff? - Mennonites,
it's a little like "Footloose." There's no--
[laughter] In that there's no, like--
You're not allowed to-- It's, like, just sort of
conservative. There's no dancing.
That kinda thing. It's sort of like
very humble, very, like, plain folks. - So you can listen to music.
You just can't dance to it? Can you listen to music? - You can definitely listen
to church music. Yeah. - So were they supportive
of you becoming an actor? - Yeah, actually I did
a show in New York called "Spring Awakening."
- Mm-hmm. - And my mom, before she'd
even seen the show, brought a busload of people
from our hometown in Lancaster to come see
"Spring Awakening." And--and for those of you
who haven't seen it, it's a show
about young people having their
sexual awakening. And so we called them "The Mennonite Bus"
coming up to see the show, and my parents--
I did it with Lea Michele. We had, like,
a simulated sex scene, and they were horrified. But by the end of the show, it was the loudest applause we'd ever gotten
for a performance. They were incredibly
supportive. And then my mom brought up
five more bus trips after that. - Wow.
- Go figure. - Well, I bet they were excited
by that for sure. "You gotta see
what they're doing." - Exactly. - "We're doing it wrong." So... But--but didn't you warn them? Didn't you tell them
what the play was about? - I did. Yeah, I did, but I was a little nervous to
give them all of the specifics. And she'd sort of
organized the bus trip without kind of telling me. - Well, then it's her own fault.
- Exactly.
