I kind of had a quarter-life crisis before I did 'Rent.' I had done Glinda in 'Wicked' for a while. I had worked for Cirque Du Soleil, and then I did 'Hair.' Then I had a real quiet time, not having work, and it was a time of not only self-discovery of me as a person, but also what I wanted as an artist and actor.
Sometimes I get more excited for shows that I know are going to be quieter because it gets me more inspired to be more of a showman and be more of an entertainer and forces me to work harder.
I tell residents, if you gave me two patients with identical problems, and one of them had family at the bedside with a lot of laughter, plus photos and a quilt from home, and next door was another patient who was alone every time I came by - I'm going to be very nervous about the isolated patient's mental status.
I think that, to a lot of people, they don't like my brand of whatever I do. And I think that people - the ones that like me, at least - see me as their brother or their older uncle or their friend or their next door neighbour. I am the quintessential boy next door; I feel that way.
Quite often, I'll be sent a script for a movie. And I find that I like it, so I say I'll do it. But then they rewrite it for me. They make it quirky. Odd. I find that rather annoying. I call it Walkenising.
Nobody ever really thought of me as sexy, right? They thought of me as smart and quirky.
I need a woman to have a quirky sense of humor. There's a bunch of jokes I use, and if she doesn't get them, she's probably not for me.
I don't watch that much TV, so I can't compare one show to another. When I watch television, I watch people talking to one another usually or a science show where they show me microbes, you know. Microbes actually communicate quite a bit, and so there's a lot of talking going on.
Technically I have siblings, but they are quite a bit older than me - I was the accident - so I have the only-child syndrome going on. I'm a little more selfish, a little more independent, a little closed. I do wish I were softer. I wish I were able to form relationships better.
It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.
A different script calls for different things. It always takes me a long time to get to know the part, and know the logic behind the words. I have to be with the script for quite a long time before things start to fall into place, before they become part of the character.
For quite a while, I didn't receive a higher academic status. I didn't feel any discrimination against me as a woman scientist, but I hadn't produced a lot of science journal articles.
As I got older, I got Parkinson's disease, so I couldn't sing at all. That's what happened to me. I was singing at my best strength when I developed Parkinson's. I think I've had it for quite a while.
I became an actor, and because I had success as an actor, I became famous. I was acting for quite a while before I got famous; television made me famous. I guess that it's television that is responsible for everybody's desire to be famous.
It's shocking to say, but the cinema is quite a while away from me, and I haven't got a car yet.
Watch me on CNN/SI. Check out clips from 'Quite Frankly.' I've always been Stephen A. Smith. I've been this way since the day I was born.
All the things that you would have thought would have made me a professional A1 criminal... wrong. I decided that was too lazy and easy, and because of the way British society is, quite frankly you were denied an education, so I got one of my own.
There are times in my career where I could've called it quits, and that would've ate at me for the rest of my life.
My job is to defeat the guy in front of me, do it until he quits, and then wait for them to send in the next guy.
One day I promised God that if he would give me my voice back I would never smoke again. I got three octaves back after quitting.
