I had never really wanted to be famous. Everyone is supposed to want to be rich and famous, but as a boy I never knew what rich was, and the first view I had of famous made me leery.
When I was growing up, we were taught in school that North Koreans, and especially the North Korean leadership, were all devils.
I remember when I was a kid, whenever you'd see cartoons cross over with each other, it always ranged from a delightful, magical surprise to a cynical, annoying cash grab.
When I left Haiti, I was eight. I went to the Congo where my father was working. The only images that I had were the images of Tarzan. That's what I thought Africa was. Of course, the first day I arrived there, I thought I would see a lot of savages dancing on the tarmac.
I was not a 'Doctor Who' fan. As a kid, I thought it was scary and for boys.
As a child, my idea of the West was that it was a miasma of poverty and misery, like that of the homeless 'Little Match Girl'in the Hans Christian Andersen story. When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say:'Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!
If at age 10 I say there are monsters in the basement and they don't believe it, I would have stayed in that house. My father would have said "Shut up and get to your room." So I thought the only sanctioned tyranny in the world is parenthood and everybody goes "Yeah." It's a dictatorship - parenthood.
When I was a little kid at home, I thought the whole world was Jewish. For years I thought Roosevelt was Jewish. I loved him. I thought of him as my father. I'm always stunned when I find out that people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren't Jewish. How could I love them so much?
As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.
The kids all literally think I'm Spider-Man, and they ask me how I shoot my webs. It's flattering and crazy, but it's Spider-Man they're in awe of, not Jake Epstein.
I don't want to go to the heaven that I learned about when I was a kid. To me, it seems boring.
I didn't want kids to think that to be happy, they had to be famous or rich or live in the big city.
Even as a kid, I don't think I bought into a lot of the mythology about Canada.
It's sad that children cannot know their parents when they were younger; when they were loving, courting, and being nice to one another. By the time children are old enough to observe, the romance has all too often faded or gone underground.
When I was a kid, I didn't know Canadians could be actors. I thought just Americans could get acting jobs.
Basically, the last 30 minutes of 'Goodfellas,' that was my neighborhood... literally. There were people on my street who did nothing but just wash their car all day and wait for a package, and that's what I thought being an adult was.
No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.
When I was younger, I never thought I'd be brave enough to go and play abroad.
Here's what I think I'm having trouble with: this is what happiness is. When I was a kid, I thought I'd just get happier and happier as I got older, and have more things to be happy about. I based this theory on observation of select adults. The problem with my results is that I couldn't tell the difference then between happy and fake-happy. Now I know you pretend to be just frigging ecstatic over everything, maybe because you're so glad it's not worse.
As a child, I seriously believed my family was going down the road to bankruptcy. I was denied virtually every popular trend, from heavily logoed Tommy Hilfiger windbreakers to amusement park season's passes.
The actual American childhood is less Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney than Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.
I'm from a small town - Niagara, outside of Toronto. When I was a kid, I thought it was really boring, but it ended up being a big blessing because I got to know myself at a young age.
When I was younger, I definitely thought musical theater was sort of more pure than film. I used to say I'd never go to film because we had to get it right the first time in musical theater. But then, of course, I started doing film and realized I loved it. Keep in mind that I was 8 years old when I said that.
Coming from West Texas at the time that I did, I didn't know you could be an actor. It didn't seem like something that actually happened.
As children everyone thinks their family is weird and they're upset by the weirdness of their own family.
