My mum lives near Holkham Bay in Norfolk, and with my dad by the coast in Suffolk, I spend quite a bit of time by the sea.
Subconsciously, there was always an actor inside me. But while growing up, it was a very normal childhood because my dad never got films to the dining table and never discussed films.
I grew up in Northern California - Marin County, Tiburon. And it's interesting. It's a very rich place, but a lot of the affluent people are - they're not as showy. So, like, they might have, like, a Saab or a Volvo. And then here comes my dad from Iran. He buys a Rolls-Royce.
I'm from Santa Cruz in Northern California, and the 49ers were my dad and I's bonding time.
My dad used to be a Greco-Roman wrestler, and he was Norwegian champion six years on the bounce from 1966 to 1971. But I never saw him wrestle. I've only read the clippings.
My dad's from Zimbabwe, and my mom is Danish, Irish, and Norwegian, so I have influences from a lot of different places.
Everybody wanna be a super dad and the best dad ever, but sometimes, I'm just realizing that I'm not perfect.
When I was ten, I went to seven schools in one year in Nova Scotia. Me and my mum moved there so that I could be closer to my dad, who is an ice-truck driver, but it didn't work out.
There's a lot of research behind the scenes that you don't get to see, but I have an instinct that my dad nurtured from when I was born. I was very lucky then.
Growing up, my father was a financial analyst for an oil company. He was just a regular dad. And when I would say, 'Hey, come see my play,' he'd say, 'Sure.' He'd see one, 'Oh, good play' - you know, very typical dad reaction.
The real reason we ended up getting into that type of music was our dad worked for an oil company so we spent a year overseas when we were young kids. Because of that, it was all Spanish TV and radio so we ended up having these '50s and '60s tapes, tapes of that music.
I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, in a really rundown old house. I'd stay out till 8:30, 9:00 at night. Just blow in. My mom and dad never really cared much. It was okay. We were pretty free to roam. I mean, I had no concept of stopping play. It just didn't occur to anyone.
I really, really like interior design. I grew up in a really old house outside of Philly that was built in 1821. My mom is really into antiques, and my dad is very mid-century. They're not together anymore, so in the middle of growing up, I, all of the sudden, had two houses that were very different but really well done in each of their own ways.
I'm sure there's some awful video of me singing when I was, like, 13 or 15 at my old school that my dad didn't take down off YouTube.
The first time I played basketball was with my dad and my older brother Thanasis.
Our dad introduced us to all of it - to the weights, to eating healthy, all that good stuff. He introduced it, got on us every once in a while, and left it up to us if we wanted to do it. And seeing my older brothers do it right in front of me, I wanted to do it because I looked up to them.
I definitely had a weird thing of being attracted to older men. Never my family friends, never my dad's friends.
I was like, 'I don't know if I could be an Olympian...' But my dad really influenced me to stay and be in the Olympics.
For a Nebraska kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Nebraska football was a quasi-religion, so I ran out to get The Omaha World-Herald every morning, salivating for the sports page. My dad, however, required that I read one front page story and one editorial before I was allowed to turn to the sports.
My dad had a retail business in Leavenworth, Kansas, and there's a whole bunch of prisons there, so it was a backdrop of my childhood, these ominous prisons sitting off the road.
