It took me nine years to get through the fourth grade. When I got into television commercials, I had to take a crash course in reading. I was 32 years old, and I couldn't read the cue cards.
My parents always taught me never to take anything for granted because it can be taken away from you like that, especially when it comes to looks. I could get into a car crash tomorrow and disfigure my face. So I have to stay grounded.
Getting ready to wrestle is like getting ready for a car crash. Getting ready to work with Brock Lesnar is like knowing you're going to get hit by a bus and the bus is going to back over you. If I'm going to work 'WrestleMania,' 16 weeks out I have to start training like I'm Mayweather getting ready for a fight.
I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don't come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.
Like the graduates of some notorious boot camp, my brothers and sisters and I look back with a sort of perverse glee at the rigors of our Catholicism. My oldest sister, Mary, was so convinced of the church's omnipotence that when she walked into a Protestant church with some high-school friends, she was sure its walls would crash down on her head.
Horseracing already has the highest mortality rate of any sport in the world per capita to the people who do it. If you crash in Nascar you still have a roll bar, and a cage, and a lot of protection. It's built to crash, but if you fall off a racehorse we all know what can happen, so it's tremendously dangerous.
The joy of 'Crash' was that it was all about the work. It was my first real part. Before that, it was a line here and there, maybe a scene. 'Crash' was five scenes, a beautiful arc, a little vignette of my own. It really meant something.
My crash and burn over drugs and alcohol is very well known; I've never, ever hidden that story. If there are people who would not vote for me because of that history, I understand.
