My mom started working at the California Shakespeare Theater in Oakland when I was two years old, so I've always grown up around theater.
I loved the gentlemanly way they treated each other. It was unlike anything I was used to. I started helping them strike the set and, at 11, began taking acting classes privately.
The theater community at large, I have to say, has just been so warm and so welcoming, and that's not something I'm as used to.
In my view, the only way to see a film remains the way the filmmaker intended: inside a large movie theater with great sound and pristine picture.
There's a kind of dynamic quality about theater and that dynamic quality expresses itself in relation to, first of all, the environment in which it's being staged; then the audience, the nature of the audience, the quality of the audience.
New York is not conductive to theater. New York does not encourage its young. It does not encourage experimentation.
It's based not only on what it played like in the theater, but it's also knowing that certain things play differently in a home theater environment. You have different expectations when you're sitting with 700 people than when you're sitting with your friends or family. It's just a different world.
My father had a lot to do with me thinking about acting, though he never saw me act. He passed away probably - he passed away as I was doing my first play, but I just think being exposed to it and being around it. It wasn't something that I ever thought I couldn't do because I grew up around it.
I loved being in the theater. It was a place of enormous excitement and happiness and safety and respect and dignity. It was a place where, if you did your job, you weren't a kid - you were a full person worthy of respect from all the adults in the company.
Having that college-town atmosphere with a live repertory company available was a real gift. I found myself gravitating toward the theater from about the age of nine. I guess it was the environment that got me started.
I wasn't especially a Broadway type. I liked film acting better. I didn't want to stay up late. I wasn't a smoker, a drinker, or a drug-taker. So that kind of Broadway life - not that that's what they do. But they do stay up late and hang out at Joe Allen's until 2 in the morning, and that just wasn't for me.
