Like all kids who want to be in action movies, I want to jump out of a speeding car, shoot guns, slide out the side in slow motion like a John Woo movie.

I'm from Houston. I think I was thirty-seven before I ever set foot in Dallas, and that was just in the airport. So I've never really been there. Dad grew up in Port Arthur, Texas and all I can ever get out of him is, "I wanted my first son to be named Dallas."

There's this notion that actors choose their career. After a certain level, I think that that's true. I still take way more jobs than I turn down, and the reason that I turn down a job is that I just can't find anything in it that charges me or excites me or challenges me about moving to the next phase of where I'm headed.

Once the audience has to use themselves to cross the distance to the character, that's what's really exciting. That's when it starts to be a discussion between the art form and the audience, and that's fun stuff.

It can be annoying not to know who you are, where you came from, or what you're doing. To try to create a character without a whole lot of information can be taxing.

Luckily, what you trade off in not being part of the comic book canon and not having some literature that you can use to your benefit, in terms of figuring out who you are, you gain in the ability to just be whoever you want to be.

I remember walking out in front of that crowd, all the parents faces and the applause, and folding my little self in half and thinking, I could get used to this. And I just never stopped.