My dad was an actor and a writer; my mum was a drama teacher. My grandma was an actress. My aunt is an actress. My granddad was a cameraman. They would've been surprised if I wanted to be a dentist or something like that.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I thought people would think I only wanted to be an actor because my dad was, rather than because I had an innate calling.
I didn't want to be an actress. I wanted to be a dentist, but you never know what life will bring you.
I was a bio major, and I was going to take over my aunt's dental practice and be a dentist.
My parents wanted me to be a doctor, and they weren't very happy at the idea of me choosing acting as a career. Everyone in my family went to university - my older brother is a lawyer - but when they saw me for the first time at the theatre, they thought, 'OK.' They like it very much now.
My mother was an actress and my voice teacher, an incredible voice teacher. My biological father is an actor, and my stepfather, who raised me along with my mother, is a psychotherapist. I was always supported in creative ventures.
My grandmother wanted my father to be a teacher because she was a teacher. He didn't go down that road until much later in life; he just kind of retired after almost 20 years as being a visiting lecturer at Stanford, where he got his graduate degree.
I told my parents I wanted to be an actress years before I wrapped my head around what my dad did for a living. It's not easy to explain the job of the television journalist, especially when a lot of my friends' dads had jobs that were a lot easier to explain, like a lawyer, a banker or a doctor.
My dad was a doctor and surgeon. He was the fifth generation of his family to become a doctor.
The announcement that I was going to be an actor was made when was I was 10 years old. And that didn't go down all that well, but I had a lot of years to butter up my parents. My parents have mellowed quite a bit, but, growing up, there was a sense that the only real professions were doctor, engineer, lawyer. Those were your choices.
My mom is a teacher, my dad was a writer for television, his dad was a writer for television, and combining those two has been sort of the goal of my life.