You have to find what makes you stable in the storm. Then, no matter what's happening round you, no matter what the hype or the publicity, you can still manage to make leaps in your work as an artist.

I am a firm believer in education and have worked very hard to tell young Latinos that they must go to college and that, if possible, they should pursue an advanced degree... I am convinced that education is the great equalizer.

People don't walk around thinking of themselves as bad people. You're part of the environment that you grow up in, and there can be decency in that. I always try to find a little glimmer of that, in anything that I do, because you can find places where there's humor or lightness in something that's deep and profound, and that tends to resonate more and make people more human. As an actor and performer, I think it resonates more with the audience when you do have the payoff.

In my college years, I worked as a union labor organizer. I was just one of the many workers trying to do my part to help the community.

Celebrity hits like a bomb. So you have to find what makes you stable in the storm. Then, no matter what's happening around you, no matter what the hype or the publicity, you can still manage to make leaps in your work as an artist.

It's great to be able to play the bad guy role because you always get a lot to do, but I'm always looking at the why. How does a person get to that particular point? It's those little cogs in the wheel that make it interesting for me to play. Ultimately, I hope for the audience to be engaged with it because it is going to take a turn.

I'm always sitting down and talking to people that are doing independent features. It depends on the project and the quotient of the people that are involved. There are a lot of different reasons [to do something], like a particular script that resonates with me, in a particular way. It may not so much even be about the part, but what the script has to say.