I can't watch myself in interviews. I feel like I look like a wreck. My mom is always calling me and going, 'Stop fidgeting,' and it's like, 'You have no idea what it's like, Mom.'
When I was a child, I wanted to be an actor, but I had really bad buckteeth. I didn't want to get braces, but my mom said I couldn't be an actor if I didn't get the braces. So, I got the braces.
I showed my mom the movie then I told her the movie got bought and that it was gonna be shown in theatres and be on video. Everyone was really psyched about it. Everyone in my little town of hounds started to call me movie star.
My mom worked as a psychiatric social worker. She was interested in people, and I guess I am, too. So we would talk about the people that we knew, and why they behaved the way they did.
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.
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.
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.
One thing my mom used to tell me was to look to the other side, and know that my present is not going to be everything. So if I'm having a bad day, she goes, 'Just imagine tomorrow. This is going to be over. This is going to be done with.'
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.
