I was a dancer when I got discovered, and I started working immediately. I started being in commercials and doing guest star roles. My first big thing, which happened maybe six months after being discovered, was 'Bring It On: All or Nothing.'
If there was any show I could guest star on, I would want to guest star on 'Star Wars: The Clone Wars' because I am such a nerd and I love that show. If there was ever an opportunity to be on that, I would snatch it up.
I did five episodes of Townies as Jenna Elfman's boyfriend. I was a guest star, but it was the first time I really got to play laughs in front of a sitcom audience.
When I was 10 or 11, I was on this TV series called 'Dead Man's Gun' and Henry Winkler was a guest star. He hung out with me and my brother the whole time. We had no idea who he was. Our parents were star struck.
It's different as a guest as opposed to being a star of a series. A guest star is a whole different responsibility. It's much different than being a regular. You come in, and it's a lot of unfamiliar faces, and you want to try to fit in as best you can, but also you want to stay there without making waves.
I hate flying. The first time I flew with my wife, Najat, was the first time I'd ever flown in my life, and that was just a short flight to Turkey. I spent the whole time with my shirt pulled over my head. Then I got used to it.
I started working with Special Olympics when I was 17 years old. I'll never forget the first time I did it: I was at Weber State, and it was the summer before I started school. We have to get up in the morning and do this Special Olympics camp.
For Christmas when I was about four I got given 'Can the can' by Susie Quatro, so that was the first record I got. And I got Skyhooks "Ego is not a Dirty Word.... I was sorta listening to the Beatles and stuff the whole time since I was about ten anyway, then I started getting into Kiss and David Bowie at the same time
I auditioned for this agency. I got an advertisement first, and then something else, which I got fired from. It was soul-destroying. And then the next thing I got, I thought was going to be my big break, and they cut the role. It was only the year that I started auditioning for 'Star Wars' when I really started getting roles.
When I first started, the very first body of music I made when I got signed to Atlantic were songs with titles like 'Unify' and 'You're Special.' And there's this song that reminds me of Meghan Trainor that I wrote, about a woman's body and not conforming, when I first started in music.
Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.
When I first started in Formula 1, I tried to ignore the fact I was the first black guy ever to race in the sport. But, as I've got older, I've really started to appreciate the implications.
I have a rule now that I can only watch a movie twice. By the third time I was watching 'The Guest,' I was hating everything about it, but the first time, I loved it. The first time you watch it, you watch it as a whole. And the second time, I think you can learn a lot. By the third time, you are just picking everything apart.
In a certain sense I made a living for five or six years out of that one star [? Sagittarii] and it is still a fascinating, not understood, star. It's the first star in which you could clearly demonstrate an enormous difference in chemical composition from the sun. It had almost no hydrogen. It was made largely of helium, and had much too much nitrogen and neon. It's still a mystery in many ways ... But it was the first star ever analysed that had a different composition, and I started that area of spectroscopy in the late thirties.
My kids are one, three, five and eight, and we are all horsey. The kids have got their ponies and can ride. Our foundation mare is special to our hearts. She was one of my first ever horses. She was my first ever winner at Chester, which is also special, and she's just the apple of our eyes, really.
The first time I ever spoke to John Cassavetes was at a Lakers game. I got up to go for a hot dog, and he was coming in the opposite direction. I don't know who said hello first, but we started talking, and it turned out that he went to high school with my first wife, Alice.