Photo: Joan Marcus

How did you make the decision to leave Spring Awakening?
I'd never dragged my feet into that building, I'd never not wanted to be there — even when I'd done it 500 times, I still loved it. But it really felt like it was time to move on and do something new, and we knew Hair was coming up in the summer. Lea Michele and I didn't want to do the show without each other — we left on the same day.

There’s an entire YouTube community devoted to your last curtain call.
Oh no, really?

You kind of don't get a word in edgewise.
Well, we planned that. Lea's very good at talking in front of big groups of people. We were very organized. She had a dramatic monologue planned.

Photo: Getty Images

You obviously have a lot of experience on the festival circuit, but how gratifying was the reception at Sundance?
Before then we’d never had an audience of more than five people. So I screened the film for 500 people or whatever it was at the Racquet Club at Sundance, and to hear the audience laugh at the funny moments and hear them go quiet at the quiet moments, and to feel the room with the film was so beyond description — other than the birth of my daughter, it was probably the most amazing thing I've ever experienced.

Photo: Jen Maler / Retna

Since you guys live in Montreal, does that mean you’re pretty fluent French speakers?
No, not at all. My French is terrible. [Guitarist] Dante [DeCaro]’s is probably worse than mine, because he doesn’t actually live here. I think we all have basically terrible French, and I don’t know whose is the worst or who is the best, because we never ever use French. The problem with my speaking French in Montreal is that if I use it I will get answered in English. But that’s a lazy cop-out; none of us have any reason for not knowing French by now.

Photo: Getty Images

So, what was it like returning to the X-Files world after six years?
Chris: Well, in a way it was one of the most natural things in the world because we had done 202 episodes and a movie, so we lived and breathed it for so long, but coming back to it had its unexpected elements. The movie’s in real time, so we had to imagine what David and Gillian had been doing for the last six years.

Photo: WireImage

So what do you think of all this bandwagon-jumping and Emmy buzz?
I'm waiting for the inevitable backlash. You can't have buzz in this country without having backlash. You can't get excited about something in popular culture without the haters coming out. We're about two-thirds of the way through shooting the second season and it's really good.

It can take a while to warm up to the characters on Mad Men. Do you like them?
I love 'em. They are very realistic portrayals of people in their own time. From our perspective, there'd be lots of calls to Sterling-Cooper HR, but that wasn't the case then. I don't see it as misogynist in a weird way because that was the norm. It wasn't coming from a place of, I hate women.

Photo: Laura Buckman

I love your first record, Night Ripper, but sometimes when I listen to it, my head feels like it might explode. Do you ever worry about, like, seizures?
It’s funny because I think a lot people misinterpreted it as me trying to make the “ultimate party record” or something. But I like it to almost be disorientating and over-the-top. If it makes you nauseous, then that’s cool to me! I’d rather make an extreme piece of music than, like, an MTV Party to Go mix. If it makes someone vomit, then I made a pretty cool record, obviously.

Feed the Animals feels a bit less cluttered. Did you set out to make something more listenable this time around?
Yeah, I felt accomplished with Night Ripper and felt that I didn’t really have to prove that I could do something like that again. I’d rather just move forward and make something a bit more musical. So I focused on layering a lot of elements with more subtle juxtapositions. I think there’s more samples on this record, but you don’t hear it. I think Night Ripper was, to some degree, about a technical achievement, but with this one I wanted to use that template to make a really fun record.

Photo: WireImage

And don't miss Vulture's exclusive sneak preview of the twentieth-anniversary Sandman poster, with art by Jill Thompson, Tony Harris, Steve Leialoha, Mike Allred, Bryan Talbot, and more!

Photo: Getty Images, drhorrible.com

Over the weekend, the third and final act of Joss Whedon's awesome online TV show, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, appeared and then disappeared. (It's still available on iTunes, and will soon be released on DVD.) Devoted fans watched the once-lighthearted series take a turn into decidedly Sweeney Todd–ish territory — and also got to see the head of the Evil League of Evil in all his hilarious equine magnificence. Vulture talked to Whedon about his DIY side project — which starred Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion — this afternoon.

So now that Dr. Horrible has aired in full, was there anything you cut? Was there was ever intended to be a song for Penny in the third act, or for Moist?
Oh no, we built it very tightly. Apart from a couple of lines for Neil that I had overwritten and that we trimmed, it pretty much stayed intact, structurally. There was never a Moist song, but God knows we've talked about one. And my biggest regret is that we didn't get to have another Penny and Billy duet. When they sang together, it made my heart go ping.

Courtesy of Universal

You almost didn't audition for this because you didn’t consider yourself a singer. What made you change your mind?
Well, I just kind of saw how pathetic I was being really. Maybe drama school put me off a bit, because I was told I had no rhythm. Then I realized who [Phyllida Lloyd] was directing it, and I knew her opera work in London, and I realized what the piece was! But my agent kept on saying, "You sure you can't?" And so I just thought, Be brave, be bold, stop being pathetic.

What was it like meeting Meryl Streep for the first time?
Very, very exciting, actually. Because I think one of the first things she said to me was she'd seen History Boys, and she said that she really enjoyed it. And you know, growing up, she was one of the terrific actors of the period. So after that we sat around this table, and you could tell we were all in the same situation. We didn’t know what we were about to be embarking on. And we all struggled with our dancing.