A Quote by Justin Theroux

I was always acting. I was doing after-school plays and stuff like that. But I wasn't doing well in any of the schools, so by ninth or tenth grade, I ended up going to a boarding school.
I was always acting. I was doing after-school plays and stuff like that.
I knew acting was what I wanted to do. I don't know if I was brilliant at it, but when I was doing school plays, I loved it so much I didn't want it to end. I feel like I'm exactly the same as when I was doing plays at school, to be honest.
I never went to high school. I never really finished eighth grade. I was kicked out of seventh grade once and eighth grade twice. Mainly for not showing up and not doing it. Then I went to an alternative high school for part of what would have been ninth grade and part of what would have been 10th grade.
I grew up in Cleveland and started doing plays in high school. And I went to the University of Illinois, and I majored in drama. And after school, I went up to Chicago, because I didn't really know anybody in New York or Los Angeles, and I knew people who were doing plays in Chicago.
I skipped school starting in tenth grade. I started doing badly and failed every class but English, so they kicked me out of school. They gave up on me.
I went to acting school for like a year and ended up doing voiceovers and stuff. I could have done a lot more with it but at the time I really wasn't taking it seriously.
I actually wanted to be a police officer like my dad for the longest time, up until my sophomore year in high school when I started doing plays. I did plays when I was little, but in high school, I started getting into acting.
I always did plays, and when I went to NYU - and I didn't go to Tisch, the theater school, because I was like, 'Well, acting's not realistic. You can't make a career out of it.' So I just studied general studies and humanities at NYU, but I was doing plays while I was there. So I was sort of cheating.
I don't know if you've been in any inner-city schools, but it's pretty demoralizing. The kids come to class bright-eyed, enthusiastic - entering first grade really looking forward to school. By the fourth grade they're just completely turned off, and by the time they enter high school, they see little relationship between school and employment. It's bad enough you have incompetent teachers and schools that are poorly run, understaffed, and lack material resources. It's even worse when the kids themselves don't feel they have any stake in school.
I'm told I was acting in school plays when I was a tiny little boy at the age of three, so they must have seen something then. And even when I was practicing piano eight hours a day, I was still doing school plays.
I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family, there's lots of children, seven brothers, two sisters grew up together, fighting with each other, went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family.
In 1979, I was in ninth grade. Before I started tenth grade, I was already rapping myself. I didn't wait around to see what hip-hop was doing before I jumped in; I did it immediately. When I first heard it, I said, 'I can do this.'
I was always the poor kid, even though I very much tried to pretend to be the other way. Always well presented. Always really active in the school, doing fashion shows, plays, involved in every single aspect of the school. Overcompensating, I think, for the fact that I knew I wouldn't be going on the ski trip every January.
You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the job as well as they can, but there's always one or two who seem much more at home in the world of impersonation.
I ended up going to public school in the first grade, and that's when I knew I had to be very strategic about my survival in school. I tried my best to be friends with people who were going to protect me.
I ran away from three different boarding schools before joining a circus school, and eventually I became an actor. The only thing I learned at boarding school was never to send my child to one.
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