When I was really young, I gravitated towards the visual arts first. I feel that's what comes most naturally to me. I've always had an immediate proclivity towards making visual art and I was a really tactile kid.
I talk openly about my past and what I've gone through - abuse being something that was very real in my household, and a lot of chaos growing up as a child. I think that I naturally just gravitated towards music that I could really feel on a deep level - and that meant sadness. I was able to connect with that at a really young age.
I wanted to make a TV show that I would want to watch and I naturally gravitated towards the genre of rom-com, because that's something that I have so much love for.
I've always gravitated naturally towards a little bit of a heavier thing, having been in punk bands and metal bands before I ever got into pop.
I was always in dance and performing arts school. All of my schools were performing arts. I'm the one that, like, turns up the whole party.
I've always performed. From the time that I was little, I was pretty precocious and always gravitated toward performing arts. But I was scared at first, deciding to do it for a living. So, initially, I majored in journalism, and I was pretty miserable.
I gravitated toward being a funny guy. I liked the radio comedians. I lived in the Golden Age of radio, and the Golden Age of television came along when I was still in my early teens.
I was grounded in the performing arts from a very young age.
I came from a really musical family. I studied classical piano because my grandparents were piano teachers, but started doing musical theater at age nine in Fresno, California, and went to a performing arts high school. That was my life.
I've always been involved with the performing arts from a young age.
That's the very definition of freedom: to be allowed to develop our own creative potential to the fullest. But it doesn't have to be in the arts, obviously. In my case, I gravitated toward the arts.
I think too many people look at the arts with a religious outlook. Arts, music, singing and performing, it's all make-believe.
I was an arts kid in every form of the word you can imagine. I wanted to sing and dance and act - I wanted to do it all. At a very young age, I was put in performing arts schools where I got to do those things every single day.
I did get bullied and I did get picked on and I did have that feeling in my gut of being incredibly self-conscious. I naturally gravitated towards my elders because I didn't know how to speak or be present with my peers.
A lot of people don't realize, when you are acting in a martial arts film, you're not just performing martial arts. You're not just performing martial arts. You're actually acting as much as any other actor.
And if you think this young boy, from Dallas, Texas, is adding to the canon of theater arts, of performing arts, of cinema, well I'm humbled and I'm very excited.