My bedroom was plastered with pictures of Van Damme. My mother was worried about me. Most teenage boys have half-naked women on their walls, and I had Jean-Claude.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I did some artistic nudes when I was I 8 with a French-Canadian photographer while I was modeling. They were beautiful shots, and they were not about nudity.
One newspaper even published one of my nude paintings - the one of me naked from the waste up.
As a kid, I was heavily into martial arts and wanted to be the next Jean-Claude Van Damme.
It was a scandal when I did French 'Playboy' in 2008, though I was never actually nude in it. I think it's really funny that I'll have a cover of 'Playboy' to show my grandkids.
My mother would kill me if I posed nude! My mother raised me with certain standards.
My mother did like to make clothes, and in I think the worst picture I've ever seen of myself - I must have been eight or nine - she'd dressed me in a matching t-shirt and Bermuda shorts ensemble which I think looked like somebody had thrown up all over it. I was so glad when that sewing machine stopped working, I have to say.
At 13, I was wearing plain t-shirts. Then I used to steal my mom's clothing. She had all these crushed-velvet shirts with French-cut sleeves. And, like, seersucker bell-bottoms.
My bedroom's like an armoury.
In the summer of 1988, my father took me up to look at the remains of our home, the dream house that he'd built. It was my first time since our family left four years earlier. Political and obscene graffiti covered the half-torn walls. There was no ceiling and surprisingly no floor: the parquet, the stone, the marble, all looted.
My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of 'The Violation' by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist I know, Brigid Marlin, to make a copy from a photograph. I never stop looking at this painting and its mysterious and beautiful women.