I was 21, and rehearsing a play, took a fall and was in a coma for a few days. And when I recovered, I'd lost my sense of smell completely.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I grew up in the East Village with a lot of old people in my building, and I'm not sure if they lost their sense of smell over the years, but they always seemed to smell like they poured a bottle of perfume on themselves. I never want to become that person.
I was a very sickly boy when I was young; nearly died when I was 7. I had a life-threatening attack of meningitis, and that put me in a coma for a few months. It took me four years to get my memory back.
I was taking a nose dive somewhere between eleven and twelve because my sister had died and I was practicing something that siblings do which is follow in their footsteps and die as well.
I remember the first time I pulled out of my driveway in my grandparents' Nissan Ultimate or Centra. I just remember getting in a car that smells like my grandparents, with both my parents standing on the lawn, so petrified. That was my car up until I was 18.
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
When I got on set, and these huge, big lights come on, it brings on a smell - it's almost like the smell of a light burning a little bit - and I said, 'This reminds me of my childhood,' because I grew up onstage.
I remember the first time I smelled B.O. was at a cross-country meet. But it wasn't unpleasant, in a strange way. That's what you got when you worked hard.
You go from movies where you are wearing nice clothes and you're trying to smell good to a movie where you are in water and you are wet all day, and you are dealing with that elements, it gets rough, but it was definitely something I wanted to try.
Suddenly a mist fell from my eyes and I knew the way I had to take.
Well I was an asthmatic child. So that for most of my childhood I was in bed. Bedridden.