“I watched so many movies when I was a kid, and I’d watch them over and over.”

Things don’t always tie up in a nice bow. Even when you make strides with people and relationships, it’s complicated.

I watch a lot of television. I always have.

Sometimes chemistry does the trick, and other times, you have to forge that with the people.

You always have to make positive choices as an actor, even when you’re playing someone who may not be doing the best things.

People saw me as just a singer – yeah, a pretty face who could sing – and not more than that.

I’m ready and open to meeting the person that hopefully I’ll share my life with. It takes a long time to get to that place.

What is wrong with you people?

After 9/11, the amount of applicants the FBI received increased exponentially. Whereas you used to require a college degree, and it was a small group of people who were just out of college, after 9/11, it changed.

I was a very awkward high schooler, especially in early high school. I had the middle part with a swoop, all that. It was the late ’90s!

Singing for stage, if you don’t hear yourself, that’s when you push, and that’s when you can hurt your voice sometimes. So if I can hear myself in my ear, it really helps me to find that balance of how loud I needed to be singing.

Once I came to acting, it was almost a thing where there weren’t enough hours in the day to work on stuff because I was so passionate about it.

Coming from a background of being onstage, you’re onstage for two and a half hours and you’re in it for the whole time no matter what you’re doing. Even if you don’t have a line, you have to stay in it.

I feel like I’ve been dealing with that building over the years because of the Broadway community, so I’m treating it in the same way – I’ve always tried to keep my personal life private. I didn’t get into this business for notoriety or fame. I don’t go to places to be seen and that’s not going to change.

In an ideal world for me, I would like to go back and forth [between film and theater]. I kind of want to do it all

Life doesn’t move in a linear fashion. Life makes lefts and rights, and it doubles back.

I was very unsure about what I wanted to do in high school.

I was fortunate to have parents who understood the importance of exposing their kids to different sports, different cultures and different activities in order to discover what we liked and what we didn’t like. They didn’t push us, they just gave us many things to choose from.

We can know what love is. It´s adults who have forgotten, so they cling to their poor substitute and yell at kids who dare to live with real love. Pure Love. Love without compromise or distraction.

When I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, the neighborhood girls would sit on the stoop and sing. I was known as the kid who had a good voice and no father.

Life is only precious because it ends, kid.

These movies are like my kids. I just love them to death. Some of them go to Harvard and some of them can barely graduate high school.

A kid who was on welfare, because he refused to steal anybody’s property or take anybody’s money. You found life a lot tougher.

Kids have what I call a built-in hypocrisy antenna that comes up and blocks out what you’re saying when you’re being a hypocrite.

I didn’t do the typical things that young kids do.