Your life changes. Everything has to be done perfectly, and I didn't follow that. I lived my life as if I wasn't in the public eye. I thought, 'I'm young. I have the right to experience new things, and if I want to go to a bar and get drunk, that's my prerogative.'
I had my daughter when I was pretty young, 28, and I had to sacrifice not going out with my friends, and I had to figure out how to juggle both raising her and also a very demanding job.
Looking back, I can genuinely say that I am truly grateful that my parents sheltered us from the public eye. This may sound like an easy task, but it was probably the hardest thing they had to figure out as parents - how to give their kids a normal childhood even though they were always in the spotlight.
I definitely lived my life like I wasn't in the public eye.
I had started out my grown-up life in New York City, but I couldn't figure out how to be an actor there. And so I had been a magazine illustrator instead.
I've lived a fast-paced life, but I had the best childhood. I didn't miss out on anything by having my daughter at a young age.
We've got to figure out a way that we give a private sphere for our public leaders. We're not gonna get the best people in public life if we don't do that.
Evaluate. Long experience had taught me to evaluate and assess. When the unexpected gets dumped on you, don’t waste time. Don’t figure out how or why it happened. Don’t recriminate. Don’t figure out whose fault it is. Don’t work out how to avoid the same mistake next time. All of that you do later. If you survive.
If I had not lived the life I had lived and did not have the wife I have and the children I have, I would never know how to play that role [of Dr. Bedsloe], and I wouldn't have any of those qualities. It's a real example of how it is true that the camera catches everything. Even the stuff you're trying to hide.
I didn't get to college until my 20s, because I was a young father on welfare and had to take all kind of jobs to support my young son. There's what frames my view on the topics I discuss on my shows, and the average person relates to that. No matter how many degrees I have now, I lived that life, and that comes through to the people watching.
I'm really interested in how we view the public figure, what makes a public figure, what makes a celebrity, and how images make politicians, so I take an interest in politics, but it's really an interest in the image.
I became popular very young. I viewed myself as just a young actor trying to figure out how to do well, and, you know, making mistakes and learning and growing.
I set my life since then attempting to figure out how to do that, basically how to have a sort of public discourse in which anything and everything are open to conversation and in which the thought experiment is a means by which to posit all manner of different realities, potential futures.
I was struggling to figure out how to combine the abstract and the representational. Painting, I suddenly understood how that aesthetic could fit together. That was a really fun game to figure out how that worked.
You spend a good part of your adult life acquiring things: building a home, filling it with objects that please your eye and make you feel comfortable. Then you spend the last part of your life trying to figure out how to get rid of it all.
Before I went on 'Gogglebox,' I could never have imagined how hard it is for women in the public eye. I thought celebrities lived in a different world, I took everything the tabloids printed as gospel, and I barely even used social media.