I watched the video [ with my first commercial] when I was 20, and in the video, there are two families. The first family is this smiling blond Partridge family, a Californian/Aryan kind of thing, all playing guitars, all singing together and harmonizing. And then, there's my family - and in my family, it starts with my mom saying that she feels like a drill sergeant sometimes, and she's yelling at one of my brothers to stop hitting another one of my brothers. It's just like, "Great, we're that family." It felt a little Simpsons versus Flanders.

Sure, I love to read, and I love to learn, but I was always nerdy that way.

My mother died when I was young, and I was filming all the time. I was all over the place. Acting was the one constant.

Do people think I'm cool because I was in a movie when I was a child? No. Well, maybe a little bit more than they used to. There's definitely a nostalgia factor.

I had people in 'Entertainment Weekly' talking about how they wanted to throttle me because they thought I was too disgustingly cute, as if that were my fault, you know, as if that was my fault, not the fault of directors and producers and such.

I was never a prodigy. I was never a child genius.

Here is something no real celebrity will ever tell you: film acting is not very fun. Doing the same thing over and over again until, in the directors eyes, you get it right does not allow for very much creative freedom... In terms of sheer adrenaline, film has absolutely nothing on theater.