The life of an actor is very random. It can be exhilarating but terrifying - you do wonder day to day where the next job will come from. Some of my friends are very talented people, but you see them out of work - which can be tough. If you wanted that kind of security, though, I guess you wouldn't be an actor in the first place.
I've always wanted to play the villain. But the young girl is never the villain.
I wanted to tell my story and where I came from and my background, because it was not easy.
It so depends on each script, because you can say... I always thought I wouldn't have wanted to do something that was kind of like as big and commercial as 'The Dark is Rising,' but I really liked the script. I thought it was really clever.
Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists. The doctor/psychiatrist figures in my writing are alter egos of a kind, what I would have been had I not become a writer - a personal fantasy that I've fed into my fiction.
I'd never painted anything before. I was quite content to take other people's work since I didn't care anyway about the subject matter. I approached subject matter as a scoundrel. I had nothing to say about it whatsoever. I only wanted to make these exciting paintings.
I wanted to get that Division I scholarship and play ball and go to school for free, and I was always about getting to that next step... I was always ahead of myself in some way, shape or form, and trying to envision how to get further along and closer to fulfilling that dream of being free and having creative agency, so to speak.
Even with the beauty stories we put out, we saw there was an opportunity to address issues of representation, identity, self-expression. We created the community that we wanted to have at 'Teen Vogue.' We were willing to lose some to have more.
I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?
Most of all, I really wanted to become a filmmaker, and I've used every acting experience to just turn it into film school.
I've always wanted to dye my hair a bright color.
I trained in martial arts and wanted to become a UFC fighter. That was my goal. I only really learned how to dance three weeks prior to making 'Step Up Revolution.' Dancing will always be fun, but MMA is something I'll never give up. I will eventually get back in the octagon and be fighting professionally again.
At age 12 or 13, I wanted to design for showgirls - for the theater!
My roots were in acting. That's all I wanted to be. Even though my father was a radio comedian, it wasn't cool to say, at a young age, 'I want to be a comedian.'
I've always wanted bigger shoulders.
My stepmother wanted to be an actress.
I always loved the Yorkshire members and was passionate about playing for the county, but the people who were running the club made it at times unbearable for me. The rulers had a history of doing what they wanted and sacking players seemingly on a whim.
While I very much wanted to be in a relationship, I didn't want to be in the wrong one.
I've always tried to set some kind of goal. I want to be better than anybody in the banking business, and when I ran the Highway Department in Georgia, I wanted it to be the best in the country. And of course, I have a high sense of public service.
As a young person, I was on the road playing music, so I was getting new environments shoved in my face whether I wanted them or not.
I have to be more modest now that I'm a mama, but I loved those days when I could really wear what I wanted to. I do love crazy shoes and clothes. But I mean, come on, I'm 38, so even if I like a dress of Betsey Johnson, I have to say, 'Stop it. Go for Chanel!'
I learned music from a book on piano theory. I was only interested in knowing about chords. From that, and from the 'Harvard Dictionary of Music,' I learned everything I wanted to know.
I always had pressure on myself through my life. I put pressure on myself and not from other people. I always wanted to be one of the hottest rappers. So the pressure comes from myself.
My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible.
I was at UC Berkeley as an undergrad when my father lost a lot of money in real estate investments in Northern California. He wanted a change of pace, so in the early '90s, my family moved to L.A., right in the middle of Tehrangeles. It was a culture shock for me.
I'm trying to find new ways to entertain myself because, if my whole world is doing interviews, I might as well put them in places I've wanted to see.
Whenever I went to a wedding or a party, girls kept complaining about their shoes. I love to dance, and I wanted them to have shoes they could keep on all night.
I have always wanted to learn the piano, but because I travel so much, I can never get any consistency of lessons. So everywhere I go, if I can find a piano, even if it is in the lobby of a hotel or something, I go on YouTube and pick some songs to learn.
My story is a little unorthodox. At first, I just wanted to book a commercial. I didn't have any expectations, and I wanted to try something new.
I started off as a graffiti artist in the South Bronx. My tag name was 'Loco' because I would go crazy and tag anywhere I wanted, in the weirdest places.
I didn't know at all I wanted to do TV. I thought I might go to law school. I might want to become a history professor.
I've always wanted to win in my hometown.
Since my father is a musician as well, he taught me growing up that if you can play jazz, you can learn all instruments and write on them. He wanted me to be a songwriter that can do anything in any genre. I'm all about doing every genre.
If we just stick to one kind of music, our creativity is limited. We wanted to extend the audience for the cello, especially the younger people, and to show them how cool and how powerful and how diverse the cello can be.
After 'Homeland,' I was offered a lot of very authoritarian, square, angry boss types, but I wanted to do something different. Casting directors are surprised when they look at my CV and see all the work I've done, from Shakespeare to playing Nelson Mandela.
We wanted to write songs that we really like that incorporate everything. It seems a lot of bands want to stick with one thing. We didn't want to be scared to do anything that we wanted to do. We didn't want anything to hold us back. We wanted no boundaries.
