Sure, I have friends, plenty of friends, and they all come around wantin' to borrow money. I've always been generous with my friends and family, with money, but selfish with the important stuff like love.
Fashion's important to me, but beauty fades. All that stuff is fun while it lasts, but anything can happen tomorrow. You've got to have so much more about you than the way you look or your clothes.
I've fixed hard problems of all kinds, civil rights and business problems. It's the stuff I like to do, and I'm good at it, as a matter of fact... and I never left my conscience at the door.
My contract with my teachers is fair, and is two pages. The union contract is 200 pages. You cannot manage your business when you cannot make any decision without going back to 200 pages worth of stuff.
We had all this kind of freedom and 'get out of your head' kind of stuff and at the same time, we were trying to establish ourselves in the business. These two things are really difficult to bring together.
I'm not in the business of telling people what to do. I'm much more in the business of describing things, situations and stuff like that and leaving them out there, and you can make up your minds about them.
I had five years in the business in Canada, and then I came down to the States in February of 2010. I had a good pilot season. I started getting guest star work. I started to get bigger stuff.
There's an appreciation of the whole picture of life as opposed to just ambition and circumstance and all the stuff that happens in this business. You find yourself lucky enough to be working with somebody really talented who you know and who you tru...
I think I'm lucky having parents that have been in show business for a while, and they don't care about the shiny stuff so much. They raised me in that way - to stay grounded, not to chase the shiny, pretty things.
I like to travel any chance I get, even if it's just a local vacation to San Diego or Palm Springs or wherever. I just like to get out and do stuff and see the world.
'The Stooges' used to be ubiquitous, back in the '60s and '70s. They were on TV all the time, but they're not on so much anymore. Kids aren't getting the chance to watch them, not to mention the fact that kids don't really necessarily relate to black...
It's rare in Hollywood to get the chance to work on something that you actually care about. The tragedy of the place is all these talented people trying to get excited about stuff they themselves would only view at gunpoint.
When I do the roles, when I'm in the room and auditioning, I'll ask the director if they're cool with me adding stuff, or just improvising while we're doing it. And I would say, like, 90 percent of the time, they say, 'Absolutely.'
Some of the hip-hop stuff people get into is exciting, because there's a passion and there's something to explain to a more mainstream audience, so you get these passionate writers who want to express their love for rap and hip-hop, which is cool.
Playing and singing at the same time is pretty cool, but sometimes it's difficult to know when you can just really let go a bit because you've got to get back to bloody microphone and sing some stuff.
When I was 24, I was full of life. I was that ham who wanted to be famous, a movie star, all that stuff. I think it's cool. But it was not what I was searching for, really. It was more a delusion.
There's been a lot of really cool stuff that's happened to me throughout my career, and I remember everything, but I don't think I savored every moment of it like I should have or like I do now.
Working with Ice Cube was so tight. He's cool, and I really like how he does family stuff. My guy friends couldn't believe I was chillin' with him. Dudes love Ice Cube.
I just cut songs I love and that represent what I want to say. And if it crosses over, that's very flattering. It's cool to know that with people listening to rock and rap, I'm sitting on their iPods along with that stuff.
My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley.
I just think if I can go from being a homeless kid with a dream of being in the biggest band in the world and making that happen, I can do a lot of other cool stuff, too.
