Dave Eggers

I have so many friends in their 80s that just have reinvented themselves yet again.

And they have, like Gary Burden, I was talking about, this art director, album designer.

He told me one time, he was like, I think he was 30 or 40, and he said he always wanted to be a cowboy.

So he just decided one day, he grew up on a military basis, but he went to Montana or wherever, worked as a

farmhand cowboy, and that's what he did for a handful of years.

And I love more than anything the people that will just make a hard break and do some drastically different thing just because they want to.

I mean, I would love to have been a cowboy at some point, stuntman over here.

So I gave Cricket, in this case, like, every time we re-meet them, he's in a really drastically different place.

Like, he's a shipbreaker in the coast of Turkey and, you know, gets a call from Olympia, his old friend, and she needs him back in the U.S.

Because he comes from rural Indiana, is that possible?

But of course, like, the number of, like...

really distinct and drastically different stages of our lives that so many of us have, especially if you're a little bit of a wanderer like he is.

So it was satisfying to kind of give it that scope.

Not even mentioned, not alluded to?

Yeah, no.

Oh, that's interesting.

I haven't done that, but it's almost like when you hear about actors writing a whole history of their character that's not in the script.

And I really, I totally get why you would do that.

And I don't think an actor can over-prepare.

I feel like all of that helps.