- 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.