When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.
I love the idea that we put in jokes the kids don't get. And that later, when they grow up and read a few books and go to college and watch the show again, they can get it on a completely different level.
Music and literature have always and continue to be massive influences. Writers such as Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness. I have always admired the humanitarians that I knew growing up in Derry whose influence steered me in the direction of some of...
I think people look at dance music and see it as kind of a bad thing, and bad people hang out in nightclubs, but it never felt that way for me. Growing up in Chicago, music was the thing that saved me, that kept me on the straight and narrow.
It's quite interesting that in my growing up I had several influences. We had gospel music on campus. R&B music was, of course, the community, and radio was country music. So I can kind of see where all the influences came from.
Like most kids growing up, I had a very wide interest. I was interested in everything. I tried to take advantage of everything, from the sciences to music to writing to literature.
Growing up, there was only classical music on BBC Radio. We had to listen to the American Forces Network in Germany, which played pop songs, or the pirate radio boats off the coast.
My access to music when I was growing up was through pirate radio, you know, transistor radio under the pillow, listening to one more and then 'just one more' until your favourite track comes on.
The music I heard growing up, since there was no TV or cinema or record covers, I didn't know if it was black, white, hip, square, male, female... whatever. I'd hear melodies and things and got intrigued on that level.
When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire.
A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.
Growing up in London, with a hippie mom, I don't know that I'm most people's definition of what a black person is. I'm mixed, yes, but in the world I'm defined as black before I'm defined white. I've never been called white.
Mom and sister played piano growing up; my grandma still plays piano in church. They always beat me over the head trying to get me to play piano, but I was more interested in riding dirt bikes and playing in the mud.
Growing up, my mom was very strict about how I dressed and how I behaved, and I said to myself that I wasn't going to be like that. But now I know I'm going to be exactly like my mom. I'm going to be worse!
When I was growing up in New Jersey, my mom would regularly take my sister and I into the city to see shows. I have many fond memories of standing in the half-price ticket line in Times Square and going to matinees.
What we're supposed to do as actors is be able to portray real human beings and emotions. And if you grow up in this bubble of showbiz and you only know people who make movies, you don't really have an understanding of the world outside.
I like zombie movies, and I like genre movies a lot. To watch. Less so to make, I think. But I grew up on that stuff. I would just grow up watching a lot of horror movies, a lot of slasher movies and then zombie movies.
I learned English at school, or at least that's how it started. Also, in Holland - as opposed to some other European countries - we don't dub anything, so as a kid growing up, always watching English and American movies in their original language rea...
I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again.
I grew up on film sets but more around the process of making films. I saw a lot of the editing process and the writing process, which takes years. That really affected me growing up, that side of it.
When I was growing up, I cheered and danced and ran and stuff like that. I'm probably thinner now than I was in high school. I had a lot of muscle - a lot of muscle in high school.
