When we were 15, my brother and I were getting really into Nirvana, Green Day, and The Beastie Boys. We started going to shows and realized we really wanted to be on stage.
We were fans of Green Day and Nirvana or whatever, but the bands we really loved were Chicago bands that didn't really sound anything like Alkaline Trio.
Once I started getting mainstream people to my shows, I realized we were taking too many solos, and they were too long. I started gauging when people were going on their iPhones.
There was a point a few years ago where I realized I started out playing boys on camera and stage, and then I translated that to playing boys in animated shows. I was like, "Whoa, this is intense."
When we were writing the 'Stage' album, we realized we'd never really done proper covers, where we were taking songs and making them our own and kind of playing around with them. I came up with the idea of doing a cover of 'Wish You Were Here,' but we didn't really want it on the record.
I started salsa dancing with a few different companies and started touring the country. It was fantastic, but I realized that I really wanted to talk every time we were performing. That's a problem because when you're dancing, if you stop to talk, that's not really cool to the other dancers.
A lot of it was really, really fun, but at some point, things started getting weird. We didn't allow each other to breathe. We didn't really have a sense of ourselves individually. We were very insecure... We were really threatened by the thought of 'Oh my God, what if someone goes off and does something outside the band?'
I started racing BMX when I was five years old. I followed in my brother's footsteps, and I was a little tomboy. When I came into the sport, there wasn't many women. I raced with the boys; I looked up to the boys, and all my mentors were boys.
My fondest memories were watching the Beastie Boys get prepped to come on stage. They had a lot of antics and they play a lot of basketball... then they were giving out cameras to the crowd, and performing from the bleachers. The most important thing I learned was that you control your crowd, not the other way around.
I kind of idolized older punk-rock and hip-hop bands, and I was, like, 15 when I started the Beastie Boys. And what business did we having doing that at that age?
It always bothered me when people came off stage and were told how great they were. They weren't, really, in my opinion. It was then I started thinking that, contrary to conventional wisdom, film was the artful medium for the actor, not the stage.
I'm the youngest of four boys, and my oldest brother, Todd, was like a father figure to me. We were very close even though we were 23 years apart. When my parents were working, he was the one there for me. He was diagnosed with lung cancer when he was 15 years old.
When I first started, in 2006, it was an exciting time. Independent, cool, weird artists were being successful, and magazines were writing about them, and people were getting played on radio that were, like, really good.
God bless Dad, he came to every one of my shows. I was bad, and I had horrible stage fright. My dad was so relieved - he'd say, 'You were terrible; this kid is not going to be an actor.' Finally, I did a play and he said, 'Son - you were really good.'
I think when I started in wrestling, I hadn't realized how difficult locker rooms were going to be. I thought they were going to be more inviting than they were.
Green Day is like sex, when were good, were really good, when were bad . . . were still pretty damn good.
I really wanted something that could make a statement about what we were doing and the life we were living in society, and the shows that push the boundaries, in those ways, are shows on cable, particularly networks like Showtime.