By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I don't know if I was so much of an outsider until after I started doing films. That put me on the outside. I grew up in Texas, and I wasn't the child of industry parents, and I didn't have a lot of friends in the industry or anything like that.
I developed a sense of self before moving to crazy Hollywood, which was really important.
I wanted to escape Small Town U.S.A. To dismiss the boundaries, to explore. My life experience came from watching movies, TV, and reading books and magazines. When your culture comes from watching TV everyday, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities.
I tend to not think about the kind of movie things I want to be doing, because I've worked in all sorts of different places, and I've spent all sorts of time in England, and I'd still do things in Australia and in America.
I had no aspirations to be part of American cinema... I was really a Europe-based person, and those were the films I was inspired by.
I first decided to become an actor at school. A teacher gave us a play to do and that had a major impact. At first, I wanted to work in the theatre, but there was something about the ambience of film, especially American films, that always attracted me.
I've had the good fortune to have a much more diverse life than most people would, professional sports and television and news and movies.
You couldn't escape the literary atmosphere in our home. I grew up as a Britisher. I played a protagonist of every nationality in stage adaptations of Shakespeare and Brecht. I graduated from Yale. When I moved to the U.S., I realized with some amount of surprise that I was seen as an ethnic actor.
I grew up accepting that my nationality was not depicted on TV or film. To be honest, it was something I didn't acknowledge as a kid. But once I realized my love for acting and the possibility of pursuing a career in it, I quickly noticed the absence of Asians in general and thought, 'Well, I'm gonna try to change that.'
Being an actor, the less people know about my personal life, the more open-minded they can be about each role I play.