I started as an actor in the theater playing a lot of character parts, and suddenly, I found myself in this place where it felt like I was getting locked into a kind of a stereotype, and it did bother me.
People think stage school is a little star factory but the truth is kids like me learned about being in a team situation and going out to work earlier than a lot of kids did. I don't know anyone from drama school who's now sitting on their arse doing nothing.
I was a theater dork in high school and did all the plays. My theater teacher in high school, Janet Spahr, was absolutely incredible and mentored me throughout school. She taught me a lot about relying on my instincts.
Middle school was probably my hardest time. I was trying to fit in for so long, until about junior year of high school when I realized that trying to fit into this one image of perfection was never going to make me happy.
I grew up an only child, and I always felt as if I didn't fit in. In middle school, in grammar school, and even high school, I just didn't feel like I fit in.
Everyone has those times when you feel like you don't fit in. Everyone struggles to a certain extent with being cool and popular, but I never really let it affect me. I played sports and did theater, and school was really important to me. I had fun in high school.
There are a lot of things going on that's causing a lot of these young kids to head in the wrong direction. I know a lot of kids that are cutting school. I try to give out a positive message, trying to get kids focused. If they don't then they're going to end up like every other hoodlum in the street.
It's hard sometimes when you're in a regular high school, you just feel like the odd kid out. The great thing about going to an art school [is] it's kind of like it's all the odd kids. It's all the kids that don't fit in at their regular schools, because you're into something and excited about something that other kids really aren't into. When you go to art school, everybody's kind of on the same page.
I think about the milestones from my childhood and what it will be like to watch our kids go through them. Taking Riley to her first day of school was a whirlwind. I can't imagine what middle school is going to be like, and high school, and graduation.
I didn't take theater or anything. We didn't have a very good theater program. It was in western Utah - was a really small school. It wasn't developed. We didn't have the funds to do anything like that, but I did act all through high school in films because Disney Channel would shoot movies out there.
At school, I felt out of place. I was bullied. I would think, 'These kids don't like me, they don't accept me,' but I felt like in the entertainment industry, I would fit in.
'Middle school' is used as shorthand for a time when things change. It's a time a lot of kids feel like they don't even have one good friend.
From the time I was five years old, theater was all I knew. I did community theater; I went to theater school. It's like going to the gym as an actor: every single night, you have to recreate the illusion of the first time, so you really have to listen and connect and stay in the moment for an hour and a half - with no breaks.
When I was in high school, I wasn't really popular. I was picked on a lot. And then I did a talent show, and kids started to tell me that I did a good job. It was the first time that my peers told me that they liked what I was doing. Something clicked, and I knew that this is what I wanted to do.
We went to a very small high school. It was, like, in a wooded house; it was a weird school. I hung out with a lot of guys in high school, and I did theater with a few of my close girlfriends.
I was in middle school right around the time the Bloods and the Crips started taking root in Compton and a lot of the other neighborhoods around me. I saw way too many of my peers - smart, kind, good kids - who got drawn into gangs and violence, and their futures were going to be forever scarred by that.