I moved to New York in 2003, I was a very young 22-year-old, so I just kind of started finding my way as a human and was working odd jobs here and there.
I just really post what I’m feeling, especially when it comes to Vine and music. For a long time, I just kind of posted six-second original thoughts, and people really gravitated towards that.
Things just kind of stick with me, and writing, for me, is always an investigation into my own feelings about them. I wonder why things stick to me, and I try to synthesize those into a dramatic experience in some ways.
I don’t really have a process. I’m very much an in-the-moment actress. I suppose I just kind of wing it because I feel that as long as I know my character, I should be able to be spontaneous on set.
Tattoos are a thing I’ve never really planned out. They just kind of happen spontaneously, on a whim. It’s kind of like curating a watch collection, it just kind of happens. I like it to happen organically.
When I was a kid, my dad kind of forced me to sing the third harmony for our little family group, and I just kind of hated it. I just felt so uncomfortable on stage, too shy.
It’s just crazy to have a dream – have a plan – and then it all just kind of comes true. To me, that proves that you have to have a vision first.
I love the unknown. I love the discovery of what will be happening and just kind of sitting back and not knowing.
I’ve been singing since I was 12. And I think that all the information is finally starting to chill out. And I don’t have to be fancy. I can just kind of do things and simplify things and try to be the best singer I can be.
Because I’d grown up with this singular focus on sports, I just kind of did that with acting. That became an obsession. How am I going to make it? How am I going to figure that out?
I do sometimes feel like I function within an echo chamber and I’m just kind of preaching to the choir.
I was just kind of sour with the sport. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I went into a period of excessive partying and doing anything that wasn’t figure skating, really. I went and built a house with my brother. I shut the whole world out and shut everything down.
Even when I make mistakes and people exploit my mistakes on television or on the Internet, and they use it to make fun of me, it’s just kind of working in my favor at the end. It’s really strange.
There are two ways of knowing if something ends badly: If you’re honest with yourself, you just kind of know it. And then there’s other people’s reaction to it.
Overall, Twitter has been a great tool for myself and my family as far as promoting our charity and the events we do and really just kind of interacting with our fans. But it can be in the negative form, and guys have to be careful.
Before I ever had my record deal, I just had a publishing deal over at Sony ATV. I had that title, ‘Flatliner,’ and just the idea of a girl stopping everybody’s heart – just kind of a fun idea.
I have felt that there’s a lot of receptiveness to female stories now. I think some of it has a little bit – a lot of it is economically driven and driven by, just, kind of studios wanting to check that box because now they know they have a woman problem that they need to solve.
For Oakley, I’m basically a media vehicle for them to promote the product. For me, it’s both, I get a salary from them, but I also get great products so it just kind of works, continues on.
And that’s what’s beautiful to me, is he did not become a victim of it, and he didn’t become a statistic, he just kind of kept on marching through, no matter what people threw at him.
I don’t go around making conversation, I just kind of stick to myself.
The way I write is that I’ll actually have a conversation out loud with myself. In a weird way, I just kind of get schizophrenic and play two characters.
I’m inspired by artists like Robyn, just because she writes amazing pop songs, and they’re not throwaway. When I listen to a Robyn pop song, I don’t feel like she’s just kind of saying something and not thinking; I feel like it’s really emotional.
I remember writing lyrics for ‘Take Me to Church’ for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It’s not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don’t actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.
I felt like for it to really turn into something, you have to jump in with both feet. And it always turns out a little different than you imagined it, but that’s kind of the beauty of it, when you feel musically confident enough to just kind of follow where it goes.
Sometimes when your coach draws something up, you just kind of go with it.
I don’t think I really do go shopping. Somehow clothes just kind of end up in my closet. I do not like shopping; I’m not into it.
I have an older son, Josh, and growing up, he just didn’t care that much for baseball. And that was fine. But Chaddie, he always wanted to go to the ballpark. He just kind of took to it right away.
I just kind of understood it, and I threw my love for others and love for life into the character, and was having a blast. I loved playing Dharma. I loved it!
I watch a lot of ESPN. I just kind of keep it on for long periods of time and watch guys yell at each other about sports things.
That’s kind of my job in the writer’s room. I’m always the guy going, like, ‘People wouldn’t say that there. They wouldn’t say that.’ Like, I hate when I watch sitcoms and something crazy happens, and people just kind of go, ‘Huh?’ and then they just go on.
With my babies, if I wanted to go pick them up I would just go in the room in the middle of the night, but Nicky is very much on a schedule. This is nap time, this is tummy time, so I’m just kind of like, ‘Okay.’
I didn’t come to L.A. thinking, okay, I’m going to be an actor, so my progression was just kind of organic, starting in print modeling, which I was far less successful in, then acting in television commercials.
Our parents more or less just kind of wanted us to pursue our passions. Whatever they would have been, they would have helped light the fire. They are very liberal, artistic people, but they didn’t force us into acting. They let us find our own ways.
I get offered stuff that I don’t really want to do, so hopefully, I’m just kind of waiting for the right thing.
There’s just kind of a sweetness about Canadians. Americans are a little more pushy, I mean, in a way that I enjoy – they’re basically pushy because of their enthusiasm – we’re a lot clumsier than other people.
I did a year at Columbia, and I just kind of floundered. Maybe it wasn’t the right place for me.
I do get recognized a lot in public. And that’s just kind of weird to me.
I always improvise with the crowd. Sometimes it will be a 50 percent show, sometimes 70 percent, sometimes it’s almost a whole show where I wing it. It depends on my mood, the energy in the room. For sure, a portion of it is just kind of winging it.
The whole idea of ‘Death Line’ was to kind of highlight class distinctions in England more than to make a scary movie, and I just kind of wrapped my political treatise of the class distinctions in England in this movie.
I trained and trained and went up against Kurt, then being a world champion in ’94, and after that I did Tommy’s tour and then my tour and all this stuff and just trying to deal with it all. And now, I’ve just kind of backed off a little.
My track record suggests that I’m not quite a mainstream darling, that’s for sure. I don’t want to only cater to a small audience, but it’s just kind of worked out that way.
I definitely carry a little bit of a burden with me, being a gay athlete going to the Olympics. I think that there’s pressure on me… It presents an amazing opportunity, and I think that it kind of gives us a chance to shed people’s misconceptions and just kind of, like, break down barriers.
The U.S. Open just takes so much discipline. You have got to be a great putter and just kind of let things roll off your back.
I always think I don’t have any songs, I don’t have anything I’m working on, and I get in the studio and realize there are 20 things I’m thinking about. It’s just kind of second nature.
I think that when I’m an actor, I get hired, and you say jump three inches, I’ll jump three inches. I just kind of trust what the writer’s vision is.
I’ve learned to treat celebrities as equals and just kind of meet them and admire their work, but I definitely could not breathe when I met Johnny Depp and James Franco.
We had a tiny budget for ‘The Greatest,’ which was the opposite of ‘Wall Street.’ We just kind of went in and did it. You’ve got four or five takes and then you’ve got to move on. We didn’t even have trailers to stay in or anything.
For me, you have to not have a formula. You have to not even sit down and say, ‘I want to write right now.’ It has to just kind of come out. It’s not something you can plan.
There’s a certain thing when you start getting into your late thirties or early forties where you stop caring. Not to the extent where you stop caring about the music, you just stop caring about what anyone thinks of you, and you just kind of let it go – let the chips fall where they may.
I just kind of conjured them up out of my subconscious and put them in order of ascending peculiarity.
