It's a hard thing for me to wrap my mind around the C word: celebrity. Rock stars are celebrities because they're larger than life. As an actor, you have to play the everyman and the everygirl. If you start treating people in the real world like assistants, that's not a good look. But my friends keep me grounded.
I like to keep people around me like the guys I have on the road with me, three of them were childhood friends of mine when I was growing up in Scotland. They don't look at me any different than when we were in primary school. So it's good to keep people like that around you. I think if you surround yourself with good honest people, they will tell you what to hear when you need to hear it.
The people you choose to have around you make all the difference. My family and close friends keep me grounded. You have to have a mind of your own and a strong head on your shoulders. Cricket is the most important thing to me, so the rest of it pales in comparison.
I am not a celebrity. I work with celebrities, and it is very difficult. When a celebrity wears a dress, it's good for business, so brands fight for the red carpet. Me? I don't like it, because fashion becomes a job about dressing celebrities. And it's a bit boring.
It's a big thing now: A lot of people want to be assistants to celebrities. If you're pursuing that, you're an idiot. You're a moron. The shortest distance between two points is not a celebrity, or being next to a celebrity.
I'm around a lot of good people who keep me grounded and don't let me get too high above my raisings. I have some good friends who don't talk about my job, and that's nice. Those are the friends who are my favorites. That helps a lot.
It's pretty simple to me: we come from a really grounded world where anything you say could be the thing that the scene becomes about. We're always treating it as if we would treat it in real life. It's all observation.
I do like my rock stars to be a little larger than life. I don't mind the earnest ones at all, but I do like a bit of individuality.
I have my friends who like me because I'm me and not because I'm in films, and that's really important to me. They tell me, 'You look terrible; don't wear that,' or 'That joke wasn't funny,' and that's really important: they keep me grounded.
If you've got people around you that are like, 'Oh, you're so good,' this and that, it becomes unhealthy. My friends are like, 'You look like a doofus.' I'm like, 'Thank you. Thank you for that.' It keeps me grounded.
Win or lose, I always like to get back to my friends and family. They keep me grounded. When I'm home with my friends, I'm always the same Gabriel. I'm no better or worse in their eyes because of my results. It's good to be with your true friends. It always reminds me of where I'm from and who I am.
My faith in God is everything at this point. Also, my family and friends that I've had around me pretty much my whole life and my boyfriend, we've been together for eight years. I try to keep people around me who've been around me, who've seen me struggle. They know how dedicated I am and how hard I've worked. They know me - not the Jennifer from American Idol and Dreamgirls, but the real Jennifer.
Luckily I've got family and friends to keep me grounded because there are a lot of negative people around who can suck the energy out of you.
When it comes to staying myself - my career isn't my life, it doesn't come home with me. So it's a piece of piss staying grounded and not being changed by it. The same things I've always liked still satisfy me. My team's the same and my group of friends are the same. Of course I'm bowled over by people's response to 21, and when I meet artists I love, it blows my mind. But it baffles me as well. I go home and my best friend laughs at me, rather than going to a celebrity-studded party to rub shoulders with people who know me but who I don't know. I'm Z-list when it comes to that sh**.
I've never been very comfortable as an actor looking out into the audience; I always like to keep my focus on the other person. When you start playing out to the audience, it takes me out of it, because people don't do that when you're in life behaving with another person - you don't often look out, around you, in a presentational manner.
When I was a kid and my parents started talking about politics, I'd run to my room and put on the Rolling Stones as loud as I could. So when I see all these rock stars up there talking politics, it makes me sick... If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal.
Everyone has different paths. I've been lucky to have a good support system - my family, friends and colleagues to keep me grounded and humble and to keep working hard. I never give up.