When I came up with the character of Wicket for 'Return Of The Jedi', which was my first film, I was a kid of 11 years old, and I basically was playing a very young Ewok.
I played a lot of moms. You're always too young when you're playing moms. My first kid when I started playing moms was about six months old. And then a month later I was doing another commercial audition and my kid was two, and then about eight months later my kid was 11.
As a kid, I was playing a character, so the film was not on my shoulders. I did 11 films out of which three were appreciated and remembered. At that time no one was following my career, so it was easier. But now when you are a mature adult, it's a different experience.
I was at a community event in Paris a few years ago when a group of young girls came on the stage dressed and dancing in a very risque way. They were only 11 years old, and their performance was shocking.
I was very, very young when I first started acting. My first movie role I was in, I was eight years old at the time. My mom got me involved in community theater stuff when I was like five or six years old. How I learned to read was by reading the captions on TV, and I grew up from a really young age watching tons of movies and television.
I've been playing the viola since I was 6 years old, and then I decided to switch it up a bit, so I've been playing the violin since I was 11. I started playing the piano when I was 11, and I started playing the guitar when I was 10.
I loved things like Destiny's Child, and Amy Winehouse's first record came out when I was 11 years old. But as a young, young child, I was just surrounded by Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, Chaka Khan - just massive, soulful voices.
Football was just the playing I enjoyed at first, but the longer you're playing the more it becomes a social event. You meet new people and make new friends. I still know some of the people I played with when I was 11-years-old, which is nice.
People don't understand this, but I started very young, and I became very, very successful at a very young age. By the time I was 26 years old, I was a multimillionaire. And I started with nothing. And I was on the road 10, 11 months a year.
Return of the Jedi' has always been favorite. It almost goes backwards for me. 'Return of the Jedi,' then 'Empire,' then 'Star Wars.'
When I was 11 years old, I was playing for the Lierse youth team, and one of the parents from the other team literally tried to stop me from going on the pitch. He was like, 'How old is this kid? Where is his ID? Where is he from?'
My first memories are from when I was very little, maybe three or four years old playing in my neighbourhood at home. I can picture myself with the ball at my feet from a very young age.
When I got the 'Blue Album,' I was 11 years old, 10 years old, and then I convinced my parents to go and get my first drum kit, which was, like, 600 bucks.
I grew up in Canada and I was 10 years old when 9/11 happened. And I think that really changed the landscape for Arabs around the world, obviously, but especially Arab actors, I think we started getting viewed a little different. Like, my whole experience just as a kid before 9/11 and after 9/11 was drastically different.
It would be far less interesting, after 'The Empire Strikes Back,' to have an hour-long movie in between 'Empire' and 'Return of the Jedi,' where Luke is training. It's so much cooler to cut from end of 'Empire' to beginning of 'Return,' where he's become the Jedi.
I remember at the time - right before we started Feministing.com - doing a Google search for the term "young feminism" and the term "young feminist," and the first thing that came up was a page from the National Organization for Women that was about 10 or 15 years old. And it just struck me as so odd that there was all of this young feminist activism going on, but that it wasn't necessarily being represented online, that the first things in a Google search to come up were really, really old. I think to a certain degree we really filled a gap, and that's why we got such a large readership.
For me, the very first video game I ever played would have been 'Return of the Jedi' on the Atari 2600.