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My first tic was to shake my head violently. I was in karate class, and I was shaking violently. All of a sudden, I just started to notice that the teacher was looking at me, and all the kids were wondering what I was doing. I suddenly felt really strange.

Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down.

I remember the moment when it hit me. I was walking down Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, and it felt like I was literally walking out of a jail cell that I had been in. At that moment, I realized I could shave if I wanted. It was up to me and no one else.

I knew that my hair was falling out and I had really weird skin. My face looked really weird and I was getting this fuzz on my face and I was always cold - always to the point of uncontrollably shaking. I was more scared that 85 lbs. wasn't good enough. I wanted to be lower.

When I was a small boy, 10, 11, 12, probably somewhere around there, when I first heard a blues song on the radio, it was a jolt of electricity. It grabbed me by the throat, it made me shiver. And I knew from that moment that this was for me and this would be with me for the rest of my life.

My dad took me out to see a meteor shower when I was a little kid, and it was scary for me because he woke me up in the middle of the night. My heart was beating; I didn't know what he wanted to do. He wouldn't tell me, and he put me in the car and we went off, and I saw all these people lying on blankets, looking up at the sky.

I was asleep, in the upstairs bedroom, in the rear of the house. There was this tremendous crash, there was a terrible wind force hitting my body, and then I blanked out.

The last thing that scared me... it was probably something stupid, like when someone jumped out at me, or I thought my new dog had gone to the toilet underneath my piano. Lots of silly things.

Suddenly I was the man who got the part that every actor in the English language was trying to get. I was really scared. I had talked the talk, and now I had to walk the walk. For three days, I couldn't answer the phone.

Forty freaked me out. I didn't see it coming. My life was in a state of chaos - I was moving jobs and moving house - and it just hit me like a ton of bricks.