When I left Parnham aged 18, I could easily have ended up twiddling my thumbs in a workshop all week. But I lucked out and found an agent who immediately got me work and before long there was enough demand for my furniture to start a shop.
I was just twiddling my thumbs in London, literally not knowing what I was going to do with my life, and my agent says, 'You got an audition for 'My Fair Lady' with Bartlett Sher.'
On my job I end up jumping out of planes. Last week I got in an 18-wheeler and drove down a runway onto a skid track. The week before that they put me in a car and sunk me to the bottom of a lake to see if I could escape without an oxygen tank.
If I'm not busy I start twiddling my thumbs.
As I got older, I'd say probably when I got to, like, seventh or eighth grade, I was living in Atlanta, Georgia at the time, and I went for an open call for an agent, a local agent out there, a woman named Joy Purvis, and she ended up picking me up.
Not long after I started posting the first 'Nimona' pages online, a literary agent reached out to me, and I ended up signing with him before I returned to school for my senior year.
If you've got a shot at having some 30 million people give you thumbs up or thumbs down every week, you take it.
I was walking home from school when I was about 17 with two friends, and they took a left into an electrical shop. While we were chatting away, they grabbed a couple of forms and I was handed one. My mum found it and made me fill it in. I got called for an interview, and that's how I ended up being an electrician for 11 years.
I got really bored of sitting around waiting for work or for the next movie to come along that only 100 people would see. I got bored of being skint, of twiddling my thumbs, wondering how to take my life to the next stage.
I studied voiceover, and I studied acting and I got my first series and my first agent a week out of high school. And it took me about five years of hit-or-miss auditioning and booking on occasion before I could support myself totally as an actor.
Once you explore life outside of work, it becomes addictive. The less you work, the less you want to work. At first, the odd afternoon off seems like a fantastic luxury. Before long, you are opting for a four-day week. Then a four-day week becomes an intolerable demand on your time, so you find a way of moving to a three-day week.
I could have easily got T-Pain or anybody like that, but let me just get somebody very left. That'll wake them up. Gaga. She's never done a rap record before. Pay attention. It's a method to my madness.
I never felt good enough about myself. I could be better at this, I could be better at that. I could look better. My work could be better. That whole idea that you're going to get caught, you're going to be found out as a fraud. That's one of those reasons I got up at 2:30 in the morning.
I was picked up on a London street by a model agent. She took me to her office and then sent me to Paris to work in shows. It was supposed to be two weeks, but I ended up living there with my Zimbabwean boyfriend. I made enough money modeling and acting in French movies to buy a nice flat.
I was lucky enough to co-found a business in college that ended up with 400 employees, and I launched 20 different projects while I was there - a project a week.
Toby not being there doesn't bother me, I mean I can work with anybody as long as we get along and as long as they've got an understanding of what I want and what I'm aiming for. To start with, when he left, it was difficult.
I got drafted into the army and by pure chance was pushed into a silk-screen shop at this camp where I was, because they could not get training posters fast enough out of a central source in Washington, D.C. So they set up their own shop to print training posters: how to dismantle a machine gun, etc.