A Quote by Derek Luke
I went to college for one semester, and I took every subject I could, and I ended up failing. So I thought to myself, Ever since I was a kid, I've loved expression - and that's when I started thinking about acting.
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There came a point sometime during high school when I started thinking about exploring acting as a career, but it was more of an intention than an actual decision. I was very interested in a lot of different subjects, but every time I envisioned myself actually pursuing one as a career, I always ended up thinking that I would rather be acting.
It wasn't until I was in college that I even realized how much I loved film and started to appreciate acting, this beautiful medium of artistic expression. All I wanted to do was go to college, and I thought I wanted to be a teacher.
After Bottle Rocket, I started getting acting work. People started offering me roles in movies. It wasn't something that I thought about as a kid growing up in Texas. Actually, maybe I would have thought of it as a possibility, but it seemed so crazily far-fetched to think that you could work in movies that I really didn't ever quite imagine it. It was just lucky.
When I was 16, my friends and I were all starting to think about what we were going to do with our lives, and I started picturing myself majoring in dance at college traveling around with a contemporary dance company, and it didn't excite me as I thought it would all those years. I was just thinking about the things that I loved most about dance, which was entertaining and telling a story, and that's when I kind of opened my eyes again to acting.
I loved writing when I was a kid and thought about being a writer then. But I didn't have the confidence or belief that I could earn a living that way, so I never took myself seriously.
I started rapping because my mom died when I was about 11 years old, and I was a very rebellious kid. I've been kicked out of every school I've ever been in since 6th grade on, expelled and dropped out in the 11th grade. Music was the only thing that I could really use to express myself, so I started rapping.
Ever since I was 16, I've had this lower register, what I thought was a very manly voice, and I was insecure about that. But once I started acting more, I realized it was an asset, and I didn't want to force myself to aim for the highest note possible.
I went to school to play sports, but I got involved in theatre in college kind of by mistake. I ended up taking an acting class almost just to get rid of an arts requirement, but I wound up in this wonderful acting class with this teacher named Alma Becker who really saved my life. I was just kind of this knucklehead kid from DC and I was in and out of trouble all of the time. I took a theatre class and she really discovered something in me and I absolutely fell in love with it.
I majored in art history. But I took theater classes, and every semester I was in college productions.
I was working at Kentucky Fried Chicken when my math teacher said, "You're failing in school, you're messing up, why don't you just try this?" I said, "Alright, let me try it," and I started going to acting classes and I loved it. I thought, "I may not make it but I love doing it."
When I was a kid I was a big fan of the Universal Monsters movies of the 1930's and the 1940's. I loved movies like The Wolfman (1941) and Dracula (1931). I really wanted to be in those movies. Eventually I started nagging my parents about it, and it turned from, "I wanna be in a monster movie! I wanna be in a monster movie!" to "I just wanna be in a movie." So I think my parents just thought that if they took me to one audition I'd see how boring it was and I wouldn't wanna do it. But I ended up getting the part, and I got a bunch of roles after that as well.
I was a tomboy growing up and then fell into the world of theatre and musical theatre. A girlfriend introduced me to yoga in college and I was hooked. I didn't really know anything about it except that it was the highlight of my week. I ended up graduating from the University of Virginia and moving to Los Angeles where I could continue acting and do a yoga teacher training. I went from practicing once or twice a week to several hours everyday. I loved it.
Post my graduation, I really thought that acting was something I wanted to do. I simply took a chance and started auditioning, and I loved it.
I started in this industry [television] as a kid doing commercials. Ever since I was introduced to it, I loved it.
I was incredibly confident on stage because that's where I loved to be. But offstage, there was no balance. I was a little shy kid that went onstage. And I always said, cocaine was the drug that made me open up. I could talk to people. But then it became the drug that closed me down. So it started out by making me talk to everyone, and then ended up by me isolating myself alone with it; which is the end of the world, really.
I loved it. I just thought I wanted to stay in college forever. I came to New York all by myself; I didn't have any friends there. But it was fine. I felt comfortable. I started thinking, 'Maybe graduate school?' I was really cool with people who were smart, who knew stuff. It's very romantic and stimulating.
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