I usually listen to various kind of singers. Curtis Mayfield was my favorite. James Brown, Tina Turner, queen of soul, I started to get that musical essence from that time before I even do my first song.
I've been around for such a long time. My first hit record was over 20 years ago and the people who bought my records then are married now and they probably still play these records and their children like them.
The trailblazers are my role models in this industry: Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, James Earl Jones, and Billy Dee Williams. I keep their pictures in my trailer and try to measure to their standards every time I act.
I do a lot of video games - I have a YouTube channel where I record me playing video games with my friends and post it. That's a hobby I have and a lot of what I do in my off time.
I used to hang out with grandfather all the time because he used to pick me up from school sometimes, or drive me to my mother's, so I'd be with my grandfather a lot. I used to watch him write his sermons.
Retaining a sense of control is really important. I like to do things in my own time, and in my own style, so an office with targets and bureaucracy just wouldn't work.
My favorite video game of all time is called 'Black Tiger'. It's a Capcom Dungeons and Dragons game from 1987. I have the actual arcade version sitting in my office.
I didn't really blossom until my mid teens, and by that time I had to work on my personality to make people like me. I found it easy to make people laugh and I was always pretty popular.
If I have a choice between putting my kids to bed and going to a party, I'll put my kids to bed. If I have a choice of going to a restaurant or having friends round, I'll have friends round. Every time.
My first film, 'Like Minds,' was with Toni Colette, who was extraordinary. I mean it was basically a mini-masterclass for acting on film at a time when all you could probably see were my eyebrows bouncing up and down on screen.
If you asked me to go back to being 14 or 15, I couldn't - it was a terrifying time. I was so awkward in my own skin. I used to hide behind my hair because I was so ridiculously self-conscious.
From the time I was 16 and I had my own checking account, you'd think most young women would run out and buy clothes. No, I ran out and got myself a psychiatrist!
Like a lot of inwardly drawn young people, I spent a lot of time in libraries. At my high school, I often spent my lunch breaks there.
One time, a girl dropped her phone in my pocket and I found it and was like, 'There you go.' And she said, 'If you'd had my phone, you'd have had to meet up with me to give it back.'
The time I'm not spending with my kid has to be worth it, so when I sat down with my agents after I was ready to go back to work, I told them: It's all about the directors.
The truth of the matter is, you lose a parent to murder when you're 10 years old, and in fact at the time of the murder you hate your lost parent, my mother in my case.
So by the time I got to Michigan I was a stutterer. I couldn't talk. So my first year of school was my first mute year and then those mute years continued until I got to high school.
Probably my favorite artists to listen to James Taylor, Stevie Wonder - I haven't gone back in a really long time and really listened to them - my first guitar influences. It's been awhile since I revisited that.
After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.
The whole time I've been an actor, from early in Houston, my goal has been to work - to keep doing it. I feel at my most satisfied as a human being when I'm working on a role.
I walk fast. I have an aversion to wasting time. My sense of constant motion is one of the reasons that my eldest daughter, Amy, nicknamed me 'the Tasmanian Devil' when she was in her teens.
