I do remember when I was little - I had to have been no more than 6 - I redid my room. I talked my mom into taking me to a store, and I got, like, all coordinating blue, green, and yellow colors, and the theme was dinosaurs.
I didn't want to just be an analyst for women's basketball and volleyball. I didn't just want to be a sideline reporter. I didn't just want to be a host. I wanted to be someone that my producers or coordinating producers could call on me for any event, any subject matter or any role.
I love exercise, but I didn't join a single sports club as a student - I have no hand-eye coordination. Things like yoga are amazing, but anything with a ball just isn't for me.
George Perles at Michigan State was the first coach that gave me responsibility as far as being a coordinator. I learned a lot from that experience.
I have more of an identity with Cowher than I do Tomlin. I knew Cowher when he came over from Kansas City as a defensive coordinator, and his teams were tough. Tomlin came in from Minnesota, and I didn't know anything about him. So maybe it's unfair for me to make the comparison.
My wife will act as the offensive coordinator at times during the evening. I'll have her read the full play to me. I'll sit there and try to picture it, spit it back out to her, make sure I'm verbalizing it the right way so that when I step into the huddle the next day in practice, things are coming out clear.
I love 'Donnie Brasco' and 'Days of Thunder,' so after I did 'The Skulls,' I was like, 'I want to be either an undercover cop, or I want to race cars!' Universal came to me with a newspaper article about street racing in L.A., and I was like, 'Are you kidding me? I grew up doing that right off Peoria in Sun Valley.' They asked if I wanted to do it.
The next day, I got a phone call from him and he told me to come and read for a movie called New Jack City. So I went over there and they told me I was gonna wear dreads and play a cop.
I hope to do multiple characters throughout my life that are separate from me. I think it's a cop-out if you play yourself in everything.
I've always been in the theater. I've always gone to it. That's been my way to cope. Early on in my career, I remember running - fleeing - to the theater as a way of coping with all the meshugaas that was going on for me.
I was not prepared for fame. It hit me hard, and I did not have the capacity to cope.
People who have not done their research on me do not know that I am European, born in Copenhagen, Denmark to an Italian father from Napoli and a mother from Alabama who was singing opera and went to Europe, met my dad, fell in love, and then moved back to Rome, where I was raised, between Rome and Hamburg.
'Orphee' is, for me, about changes: about moving to a new city, leaving behind an old life in Copenhagen, and building a new one in Berlin - about the death of old relationships and the birth of new ones.
I've met a lot of artists who wanted to paint me. LeRoy Neiman was one. He did it from a photograph. He made 20,000 copies, and we sold them all.
Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.
For me, writing is a kind of coping mechanism.
'Johnny' was a coping mechanism who could take those things which could have ordinarily destroyed me, by tweaking my past and throwing it back out there, getting laughs from things that would have otherwise upset me.
My mother was a sociologist and an intellectual, and my father was an industrialist with a business in copper and aluminum wire. He was very strict and he wanted me to work in the family business - for him, the worst thing was having a daughter who worked in fashion.
As an actor, Coppola trained me. That was my training ground.
Honestly, this will never happen because she's so much classier than me, but I would love to work with Sofia Coppola.
