I've sung my whole life. I've taken lots of voice lessons and I love to sing. But I've never really sung professionally at all.

I just think it's really funny and entertaining. I mean, I don't necessarily take them really seriously - I don't even think a lot of really good films get seen. But I don't think that's what it's about. I mean, how amazing was Ellen Burstyn in Requiem For A Dream ? Especially as she was acting with herself most of the time. I don't understand how a performance like that can't win. I was so affected by that movie that I had to turn it off. I felt as if I was on drugs and my heart was about to leap out of my body.

Oh, my God, this amazing cool breeze is coming through my window and the sun is shining. I'm happy.

I just remember saying to myself that I'd much rather do movies than modeling, and that it was worth a try. I didn't really know anything about it. I hadn't seen many movies, or so-called, good movies. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Star Wars and Night of the Living Dead. When I got more curious about the movies, I thought they were something you had to learn about and go to school for and read every book.

To me, the coolest are the terminally uncool.

Being a teenage model was lot of fun, like playing dress-up. I'd feel ugly and awkward and chubby, and they'd transform me. Not that that makes everything better. Then my mom shopped the pictures around, I guess, and the agencies started calling. I wound up going with a little agency, Spectrum. It all happened really quickly, I started modeling for magazines like YM and Seventeen, and I did a couple of bigger things like Italian Vogue.

I didn't read much as a kid. Strangely enough, when I first met my dad, Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler, I didn't know he was my dad and I fell in love with him. I put his poster on my wall.