I felt like I had never really heard of a story that reflected the stuff I was going through as a mom. I came up with an idea for a story about motherhood that I would want to read.
My mom is very structured. She gets up, she does her prayers, and she eats her oatmeal with blueberries and Greek yogurt, and she has her prayer list, and she doesn't worry too much about things.
My mom would be leaving the house and she'd say, 'Don't you pull out all of the old dresses in the attic and put on a show again!' And the door would close, and that's exactly what I'd do. The show was calling me!
I watch the weirdest things. I watch old episodes of 'Golden Girls' because my mom watches it, so I grew up watching that. Sometimes I watch reruns of 'Futurama,' which is a cartoon and not based in the real world at all.
When I was younger, on weekends, my mom would make us pancakes with our initials on them and then a tiny cup of coffee. I remember at 10 sneaking my own coffee and pouring a ton of sugar in and going up to the playroom and drinking it.
When I eat, I have to chop up everything on the plate and stir it all together. It devastates my mom. Everyone at the table is like, 'That looks like cat vomit.' And I stir my Coke with a spoon until it's flat.
I told my agents that I didn't want to go on the audition. But as that was happening I called my mom, who has been watching the show from the beginning, and my mom said, 'It's the coolest show. You have to go.'
I'm an immigrant kid who came to America from India when I was very young and grew up in New York City with a single mom and really was influenced by all of those immigrant cultures bumping up against each other.
My mom once lost track of me at the zoo and when she found me I was lecturing a man about the difference between dromedary and Bactrian camels. I was about 3 1/2.
I know my mom said as early as she can remember letting me watch TV, my one treat a week when I was like 6 was to stay up and watch 'Saturday Night Live.'
I really wanted to be a mom. I didn't want my kids to be raised by a nanny, which would have been the case if I were working two movies in a year, you know? And I would have been hospitalized with fatigue.
I wanted to be an astronaut and wanted to go to space camp, but then I found out that I was too short to become an astronaut. My mom really made me believe that if I worked hard enough and if I really wanted to do it, I could do it.
I'm from Manchester, Mass., so it was lobster, lobster and more lobster! Also, lots of fish that we caught in the summers, clam chowder and roast beef sandwiches. But my mom was pretty healthy; we had a lot of chicken and broccoli and rice as well.
The Sherry Theater, which I named after my mom, is a place I can go. I do want to give back to the community. There are so many people out there who want to be seen and heard, and get connected.
I skated and rode bikes on ramps, and my mom was always super supportive. She was one of the only divorced moms in the neighborhood, so all the other parents looked down upon her for letting her kids do that kind of thing.
I didn't really know what I wanted to do, and then I got this call from a casting director in Los Angeles. She remembered me from something years before, and she called my mom wanting me to audition for this thing.
I made some truly awful movies. 'Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot' was the worst. If you ever want someone to confess to murder just make him or her sit through that film. They will confess to anything after 15 minutes.
I would go visit my mom on Sundays, and my brother was working on stuff. I'd go in there and sing a little melody, then we started working with words and the next thing you know it was just born organically without really trying.
I was almost 8 years old when I was watching a kid on a TV commercial, and I told my mom that I wanted to do the same thing. She said that I would need to get an agent and that she would research it.
My father came from nothing, so he believed that people could do anything if they worked hard enough. I think he liked that I chose to be an actor. Both he and my mom were totally supportive.
If marriage can be redefined so that it no longer means a man and a woman but two men or two women, why stop there? Why not allow three men or a woman and two men to constitute a marriage?
