I'm a working-class former apprentice electrician; at the age of 14, if you'd told me I would one day be standing on a stage with Mel Brooks, I'd have thought you were off your head. But these things can happen.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I've always found that once you're in the door of a place and you have the chance to show how you operate and how talented you are, then anything can happen.
When I got on stage, I felt this bolt of electricity hit me, and it was this shock of, 'This is exactly what I'm supposed to do with my life.'
No one would have picked me out in high school and said, 'This guy is going to be in show business.' I don't have any of the talents you would normally associate with show business.
Going through the ranks and all the training you do as an actor, you hope you're going to make it. But there's a part of you that's got to be realistic and say: 'Look, it might not happen to me.'
My mother and father raised their eyebrows at first when I said I wanted to be an actor because I was in this industrial city. My dad had done a bit of boxing on the side, but he was a welder first and foremost. I was 17, and I said, 'I want to be an actor.' They worried it was a waste of time.
When I was in junior high school, the teachers voted me the student most likely to end up in the electric chair.
I thought that I'd never be able to work in films or TV. Another girl would be cutting her nose to be an actress. I was always very sure about myself.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't become an actor. If perhaps I'd stayed on at university and become an academic.
I am part of an age-old profession of musicianship. I believe these times require grounding, real-ness and fun. Let's do it. Whatever happens is all good.
I would hate to be 65 and think, 'What if I had tried to be an actor?'