I would rather be a person who struggled there than someone who had a great, easy time and then got out in the world and was like, "Wait a minute, I didn't get voted class president? What's going on?" You know, "popular" doesn't necessarily correlate to anything. "Popular" still has to get up at 7:00 in the morning and go to work and do something worthy too. There's no edge, really, that you get from being whatever was popular in school.
My mother had lived in London since I was little, so she never got to see my school plays and stuff.
I think there's more pressure to stand out in a way that is measurable externally. The fame culture is definitely way worse and weirder than it was when we were in high school.
I remember feeling a huge amount of anxiety and worry and pressure. At that point I was headed into acting school. That was 100 percent the only thing I thought I wanted to do. But then I got through my first year of college, and I was, like, humming and rolling around, pretending to be a lion in acting classes at NYU and visiting our classmate Charlie Gregg at Harvard, where he was actually learning things. So I changed my mind: I decided I actually wanted a different kind of education, and that was an incredibly freeing idea.
If you do have something you love to do, the fun part of the job is no different than what was fun about doing it in high school for no money. I thought there would be some greater reward in succeeding.