There's this issue where I'm really doing well and got hate 'cause I'm too light-skinned. I understand why people say that - throughout history, the lighter you are, that's how it's been. But it's not my fault. My mom and dad had me! I look how I look.
Light-skinned black people are seen to be closer to white people. The allegiance to lighter-skinned people has operated in a very destructive way that we have internalized ourselves inside black communities. You look at many of the prominent black people in this society who have been able to do well. Many have been lighter-skinned.
I've had people appear in my life that have helped me. I had more fun. I approached it thinking how would Jack Nicholson, "How would he do it?" So that's really what I did was I created this Gremlin character. So now people come up and they say 'Oh The Exorcist!'.. and I'm like "Did you see Repossessed?" They say either no or yes or whatever, and I say look at this, have a laugh, and then go back and look at a masterpiece.
If your girlfriend is saying, 'Ugh, look at my stretch marks, look at my rolls,' don't say, 'Yeah, I hate my thighs, too.' Say, 'No, you look really cute today - and I feel good, too!'
I look very foolish. To a lot of people I look foolish in what I'm doing and I understand that. The only thing that matters is how I feel and if I let how they feel affect me it'll change how I feel.
It's too easy when you're not winning to look for excuses and point at others for reasons. You ca say 'Oh well, it's this guys fault or they don't do this well', or you can say 'I've got to play better and contribute more'. You've got to find another gear and come up with big games.
After getting the job at MTV, the challenge was, 'How do I start my career as a television host without people holding my dad's career over my head?' It's a very easy thing for people to look to my dad and say, 'Well, he got his job because of this.'
I actually have no style whatsoever. I'm the worst. I have people I talk to, and I say, 'Please tell me how to dress because I don't know what I'm doing.' The biggest thing for me is my mom. I'm like, 'Mom, do I look good?' If she says yes, I'm good to go.
Why climb? That's a question that baffles me. It perplexes me. I really asked that a lot on Everest. I can't justify it. I can't say it's for a good cause. All I can say is look at the history of exploration: it's full of vainglorious pursuits.
I like people who are devoted to me: men who know I'm the most fabulous thing in the world, and they just look at me with adoration. That's how my dad looked at my mom, and that's how I expected to be looked at.
Everyone thinks that because my dad was really well known for his body that I would have that pressure too, but the truth is that I don't look at those pictures of him being really muscley and say, "yep that's really what I want to look like!"
In my country - even though we have a lot of dark-skinned people - people think the lighter you are, the better you are. They think beauty has to do with being light-skinned. I think that's really wrong.
Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israelis and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.
It took a lot of guts to change it and say 'I don't like the life that I'm living and I don't like the swimmer I am', so let's change it completely and say 'Look, I've got to learn to love myself'. And that's been a really hard thing to do because when you've done a performance that you're not proud of and the public and the media have criticized you.....people are really quick to make judgements so it was tough to say 'Well I don't care what you have to say. I'm going to do this for myself and if you don't like me after this, well then, it's too bad'.
I think people are more in contact now with the consequences of war than they've been for a very long time. And that's what amazes me when sometimes politicians seem to forget their history. They don't look and re-learn about what has happened before. Maybe they haven't got the memory, maybe they're already too young, but you can see how we become puffed up, and how we as a nation rise so quickly if we're not careful.
There's been a lot of simple vilification of right-wing people. It's really easy to say, 'Well, you're Christian, you're anti-this and that, and I hate you.' But to me, it's more interesting to say, 'What is this person like and how do they really think?'
I was about 20 when my mom got sick with cancer and it was bad. It was very scary and at the time I was doing my first screenplay and I was on deadline and was alone with my father in Massachusetts. I said, "Pop, you know, I don't how I'm going to work. I don't know how I can get this done. You know, I got to hand this script in and I can't think about anything but Mom." He said, "Well, you know, now is the time when you're going to learn what it means to compartmentalize." And those words really had an impact on me.