CD: You’ve been in a similar situation to this before, where you were cast as the lead in the sitcom Big Lake only to have it get cancelled early on. I imagine that having had that experience and feeling terrible but then seeing that your life and career went on must help give you some perspective.

CG: It does take the pressure off. Even in your question, I didn’t really feel terrible after Big Lake, which was really surprising. To get a chance like that to have a sitcom, and then to have it just fizzle out, you’d think it would be really bad. Especially for a guy who already has depression issues, he might just spend a whole month in bed wondering how things went wrong. But really I was just like, that’s fine, man. Let’s get back to work.

That really showed me that you get into this lifestyle in entertainment where you’re, like, chasing goals. But when you get there, the goals aren’t as satisfying as you thought they were going to be and when they don’t work out, it’s not as devastating as you thought it was going to be. I realized that the chasing of the goal is the fun part anyway. Getting the goal brings its own pressures.

In my experience and for a lot of my friends, you achieve things but it doesn’t necessarily ease your anxiety or make you feel like this all couldn’t go away tomorrow anyway. So I just learned to enjoy the actual process of chasing stuff rather than always looking toward the achievements at the end.