I really wanted people to pay attention to me and like me. And the class clown thing, you know? There's a weird desperation to the class clown when you really investigate it. Why are they trying to be the clown so much? They're filling some kind of hole.
I actually wasn't really the class clown growing up. The class clown was always the mean guy who walked up and was like, 'You're fat. You're gay. I'm outta here!' I was always more kind of awkward and introspective.
You gotta understand, there are two different kinds of Asians - the kind who are good at school, obey their parents, go to college - that kind of stuff. And then you have my family - me, my brother, all of my cousins - we're just wretched people.
I was sort of the class-clown type, and I was also in school plays, and I always liked comedy.
People are always saying that I must have been the class clown, with all these voices. No, I was way too shy to be the class clown; I was a class clown's writer.
In high school, we used to sign to each other during the game, signaling different plays and stuff like that. It was kind of fun. It was definitely unique.
It's okay to be kind of looking for what you want and trying out all kinds of different ideas and different course work, etc.
In high school, I was the class comedian as opposed to the class clown. The difference is the class clown is the guy who drops his pants at the football game, the class comedian is the guy who talked him into it.
I think a lot of young kids at school are very conscious of trying to keep credibility in case they kind of stand out in a crowd and get bullied by trying to stay cool and stuff. And my whole thing, all the way through school, was I was just a goof... I didn't care.
I guess my performance at school was doing school musicals, so I was a knight as well at the back of the stage in Camelot. It was all those kind of things. It wasn't the stuff that I wanted to do. The real funny character stuff came out when I was in control of it myself and writing it myself.
We really had the whole piece laid out in like a Word file, just from beginning to end. It was kind of more like your creative-writing class in school. You know, you have the outline and then you just kind of plug the stuff in the little map you've made.
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 started out trying to play more straight-ahead jazz. I went to Berklee in the early '60s when it was a brand new school, and so there was no fusion music. There wasn't a lot of mixing together of different kinds of music at that time, so jazz was kind of pure jazz.
I like doing this stuff [stunts] though, it's kind of the whole reason that you want to do the movie. When you're reading it you're like, "Oh, I get to dive out a window? Cool! I get to jump off a building? Great!" So I love doing that stuff, it's like the stuff we used to do in high school to be stupid and fun.
I was always kind of a loudmouth to the point where I annoyed my teachers and friends.
In reality, I've always been an actor - since I was a kid. I did theater growing up in New York. I was always in the plays in school. I was either going to be an actor or an athlete or a soldier. Those were kind of the three paths that I always kind of embarked on.