Being a lawyer, even in a city as large as Chicago, is like being a citizen of a small town. I love watching the life of the town play out. You know, the rise and fall of individual lives in the entire community is just fascinating to me.
My love of movies started when I was 7 years old, living in a small town, going to the movies all the time, and finding the people in the movies more interesting than the people in my small town. Also, at that time, it wasn't that easy to find out about movies.
A town is a thing like a colonial animal. A town has a nervous system and a head and shoulders and feet. A town is a thing separate from all other towns alike. And a town has a whole emotion. How news travels through a town is a mystery not easily to be solved. News seems to move faster than small boys can scramble and dart to tell it, faster than women can call it over the fences.
A small town is automatically a world of pretense. Since everyone knows everyone else's business, it becomes the job of the populace to act as if they don't know what is going on instead of its being their job to try to find out.
The hardest thing I've had to overcome was being from my small coal-mining town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia. My mother was a coal miner for nineteen years, and the expectations of making it out of my town were slim to none.
I grew up in a town - it was so small that I was like, 'There's absolutely no way that I'm going to stay here and live the kind of life that everybody else does.'
I grew up with this crazy upbringing of living many places and always being the new kid in town, not like a service brat where you're always going to school with other new kids in town. I was constantly arriving in small towns and going to school with kids who'd been together since they were in kindergarten.
I don't know if I have a legacy, but I will say that I'm proud of the fact that I'm from a small town in a small state and I've had more than a small impact.
I've had challenges in my life that have been very public, but I don't think that's any more difficult than someone who has a struggle in a small town where everyone knows everyone else's business. It's just on a more publicized scale.
I thought I had played Ted for the last time when he left Sacred Heart Hospital to be with the love of his life. But the producers of 'Cougar Town' had other ideas.
Grew up in a small town where there was only one crazy guy. He didn't even go insane doing anything good, like going to 'Nam or having an extended acid trip. Turns out - legend has it - he just had some bad cheese.
I've literally, in my entire life I've had two guys come up to me and ask me out. Other than that I have had to go and try to like spend time with them, or sort of start the conversation, basically like spell it out in a Sharpie, like, you know?
For most players it's hard to accept you've ended your football career and that you have to go out and do something else. But the way it happened to me, so suddenly... I went into depression and had to deal with that, being depressed, something that had never happened to me in my life before.
And that had a powerful appeal, particularly to those who had been denied the choice to stay on at school, to go to university, to be something else, other than going down the pit.
The point of life that I'm currently at is a 'me right now' type of attitude. I am 37 years-old, my son is in college and my daughter is in high school. I'm becoming okay with me. I can't live life as an artist or person being someone that someone else has tried to mold me into. I'm not going to put on a dress that's two sizes too small. I'm custom making my own clothes so that they'll never fit anyone else if you know what I mean.
Being from a small town my parents wanted me to become an IAS officer but being an actor I lived the life of everyone. I've been a cop, a hardliner politician, a magician, a watchman, a don, a smuggler, an officer all in one life!