It's always been my mom and I against the world.

I've been trained in dancing and I used to be quite good, though I am a bit rusty right now. But I could probably brush up in a couple of months. The funny thing is that I actually took classes from Savion Glover, who worked in Happy Feet, when I was a kid. Isn't that wild? I was part of a selected group that was brought into New York from New Jersey (which is where I'm from) to study, every Saturday: ballet, jazz and tap. It was a musical comedy group.

I consider myself a character actor.

With all the technology we're inventing and what they're coming up with scientifically, people are having longer lifetimes. It's scary, but in the same sense it's also very exciting.

The older I get, the more I embrace my own idiosyncrasies.

I would hope with all my heart that people understand this and see it in the film. And there are also other messages in Happy Feet, like racial and environmental ones, but none of them are so overt. George has made a great story about penguins with a lot of humanity in it and audiences can follow a species we don't know that well.

I'm trying to figure out the trick of working to live as opposed to living to work, but I don't know if I've quite stumbled upon it just yet.