I got an agent when I needed one, when I had a contract negotiation for the first time. I was doing the Second City E.T.C., and I got invited to audition for the last season, it turns out, of 'In Living Color.'
I was under contract with Walt Disney at the time. I was co-starring in my second season of a show called, Texas John Slaughter. The Andy Griffith Show hired me to play Thelma Lou. I only worked when they called me. I would do an episode in two days and I got paid $500. After all the federal, state and local taxes were taken out and then my agent's commission I only got $200 some dollars per episode.
I hadn't worked for a year when I had my Prison Break audition and it was the easiest audition I've ever had. I got the script on Friday, went to the audition on Monday and got the part on Tuesday. I was shooting the pilot a week later. I didn't have time to be nervous - it happened so quickly.
As I got older, I'd say probably when I got to, like, seventh or eighth grade, I was living in Atlanta, Georgia at the time, and I went for an open call for an agent, a local agent out there, a woman named Joy Purvis, and she ended up picking me up.
I'm looking forward to Phoenix. I ran well there last year in the Nationwide Series, and it was one of the tracks I made four Sprint Cup starts at last season. In the Cup race last year, I had a good run going for it being my first time there in a Cup car, and unfortunately got damage from an accident. It's not a restrictor plate race, so this will be the first time this season that I will run a lot of laps in practice. It's also the first race for the new qualifying format, so it will be interesting to see how that works out. Overall, I just want to have a solid run in the BRANDT Chevy.
Acting was absolutely my first focus. I graduated high school in L.A., and two weeks afterwards, I moved to New York City, and I got a job in a mail room, and I got an agent, doing what actors do, with head shots and all the rest of it.
I got my SAG card quite unexpectedly. I was here in Los Angeles doing a play called 'Vanities' - it was 1976, I believe - and I got invited by Dustin Hoffman, whom I'd met in New York, to come audition for a movie he was directing.
I got my big break in Bollywood with Anurag Kashyap's 'Raman Raghav 2.0' when I got a call from one of the casting directors to appear for an audition. At that point, I didn't think that I would make the cut since I was auditioning for a Bollywood film for the very first time. Within an hour of the audition, I was told that I had been selected.
Any time you sign a contract it means that you had a good season last year and that you need to improve yourself this season.
Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
When I first started acting I was about nine years old. I had never been to audition in my life and my agent sent me out. It was just a commercial for 'Harry Potter.' That was the first thing I ever went out for and I got the 'Harry Potter' commercial which was really cool, but I didn't play Harry Potter.
I wanted to become an actor. I went to Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which is one of the main drama schools in London where you go when you are older. But I was doing the junior one when I was a kid. And some friends there had agents. I was fourteen and I was like, "I want an agent! It sounds awesome!" I had no idea what that was. I thought those guys looked like men in black. They were hanging around in suits all the time. So I luckily got a very good agent in London and started auditioning. And then when I was 16, I got my first film and I've been working ever since.
When 'Hung' got canceled, I was available for pilot season, and 'Arrow' was the first thing I auditioned for. It wasn't the first script that came to me, but it was my first audition.
Listen, I'm 41 years old. I've got two kids. I've got a career. The last thing I need to be doing is having a beef with A Tribe Called Quest. It's silly and it was unnecessary. It ain't the first time that a director hasn't seen eye to eye with a subject and it ain't going to be the last time.
I did Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman. It was a sequence where the president got captured and they made a doppelgänger of the president who was kind of goofy. They were Second City people who were the producers and writers, and they told my agent, "Well, we know Fred can do the kind of goofy, but we're not sure he can do be the straight president, kind of the Clinton-esque." So I really got my back up and I called my agent and I said, "Goddammit, I insist that I go in and read." And I did a great job and I got the part.
Within my second month of being in L.A., I booked my first audition. It was, like, a co-star on a show called 'Gang Related.' I got cut out of it.
I had read the Animal House script, and by hook and crook, I finally got an audition. It was a great one. John Landis followed me out into the hallway afterward and said, "I've never done this before, but you've got the job. Now don't tell anyone!" I've never had a director do that. It was one of those Hollywood-dream-come-true stories. They saw me as a surfer or cowboy, not a preppie, but someone begged and borrowed me an audition, and I went in and got it.