I played football growing up in junior high and high school.
I grew up in Glen Ellyn, which is about 20 miles west of Chicago. I attended Glenbard South High School and University of Illinois. I didn't study acting until I moved to Los Angeles after college, but the fact that I was raised in the Chicago area set the stage for all of my comedic and acting sensibilities.
A lot of people, even my parents, thought, "Art school, I don't know. We'll support you but the success rate for artists is really slim."
Actually, I didn't study photography at first. I went to school for painting my first year, poetry my second year, graphic design my third and fourth year, and photography my fifth.
I was voted most artistic in school.
I knew my ticket out of the suburbs was art school, so I worked really hard to develop my portfolio and get a scholarship.
I didn't go to school three years for nothing. It was something that was understood. Even though I went to play baseball, one day I would come back and get my degree.
I got out of Las Vegas after high school. I knew that if I stayed there, I wouldn't have been able to pursue my dreams as an actor or dancer. My family always told me to dream big, so I made sure that I got out of there and explored new places, because the world is huge. And I'm still learning new things every day in this business and in my life.
I feel incredibly blessed. I'm happy, but all of this movie business, and working as an actress is really hard. When you're not working is when you have to stay positive and remind yourself that you're talented. What's due for you is due for you, and you don't know when that's going to come. That's something I struggled with after I got out of school, wondering how long I was going to have to wait. Then beautiful jobs started coming to me. Now, I feel that my path is going to be what it's going to be, and as long as I relax and breathe, I can enjoy it.
I remembered a mantra that one of my teachers used to tell me at drama school, that every thought will pass across your face. Even if you're thinking about Shreddies the camera will read it.
It's a good time for me, but it's only recently I've become comfortable in my job. At the start, it's hard having the nerve to call yourself an actor, let alone doing it. I gave myself two years after drama school, and if I didn't make it, then I'd give it up.
Probably the first time I was a boss was when I was associate dean of the graduate school at the University of Southern California. I was in my early 30s.
I didn't go to film school. I just kept doing videos and whatever. So I guess I learned my education from just experience. Figuring out what worked and what didn't work.
There are times when you just get down, you feel like nobody likes you. We're in high school forever. It's just what we do with it.
I've never owned a really bad car, but when I did my driving lessons I had something pretty bad. It was a Skoda, from back before Skodas were actually good, because I know they've got better recently but this was a proper old one. Roy's School of Motoring, it was called, and it was this cream Skoda with a long bonnet. He did 20 lessons for a really cheap fee because nobody wanted to be seen in this cream Skoda around Enfield!
While I was trying to save money to go to the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Australia I ended up getting all of this experience which meant that by the time I had enough money in the bank to go to school I didn't really need to go to school anymore.
I've always been a 'your parents have got to come up to the school' type of person. Even now, when I do something wrong - if I say something inappropriate on a live tv show, for example - I half expect to have to deliver a note to Barbara Brand: 'Please come up to Channel 4 head office, Russell's done something despicable.
Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
The economy has definitely been improving, and things like the stock market are doing better, but the economy has to be good for working-class and middle-class families who work every day, send their kids to a school like is in front of my house, and they have to be able to enjoy their lives. That's why you don't pass a trade agreement that ships even more jobs overseas.
I have a practice of really not talking about the competition. I'm from the old school.
There's an African-American professor at a noted Ivy League school who is saying there's three kinds of white people, and only one of the three different kinds is worth anything, and that they're so tiny and so small a group that you don't need to be worried.
[Kellyanne Conway]taking [Jennifer] Palmieri to school. You had a lousy candidate, you've got a candidate who's arrogant and aloof and didn't even campaign in states she thought she was gonna be coronated in. She thinks she's better than everybody else.
In 1970, you went to school to find your husband.
We are watching people who've been educated in the public school system and in colleges for the last 25 or 30 years become adults. They're getting jobs as TV commentators and journalists and writers and editors and producers in the media. And we're simply seeing the product of what they've been taught. And they so hate what they've been told is America's history and past that they want everybody to know they disagree with it and they've got nothing to do with it, and they had nothing to do with it, and don't blame them.
By the way, Howard Zinn's History of America is front and center at the gift shop of the New York Historical Society. The New York Historical Society is deluged with school kids on a daily basis.
