After a year or so I really thought I was Howard Hughes. Here I was at eighteen years old, getting all these checks.
By the time I entered high school, I had forsaken academics altogether in favor of my burgeoning acting career.
'Why do you think it is...', I asked Dr. Cook ... 'that brain surgery, above all else-even rocket science-gets singled out as the most challenging of human feats, the one demanding the utmost of human intelligence?' [Dr. Cook answered,] 'No margin for error.'
So what I say about Tracy is this: Tracy's big challenge is not having a Parkinson's patient for a husband. It's having me for a husband. I happen to be a Parkinson's patient.
I didn't want o do metal work and get my hands all nicked up and be around guys. So I took drama because there were a lot of girls.
[My son] will have a fairly stable future. Not one where the schoolyard talk is whose father grossed $8 million on his last picture.
You know what I want? The answer is, I truly don't know what I want. I don't want to do a television series. I want to do dramas as well as comedies, but I have no idea what kind or in what order. Just give me the chance at them.
I find as long as I acknowledge the truth of something, then that's it. I know what it is and then I can operate. But if I overestimate the downside of something or the challenge of something and I get too obsessed about the difficulty of it, then I don't leave enough room to be open to the upside, the possibility.
I take the medication for myself so I can transact, not for anyone else. But I am aware that it is empowering for people to see what I do and, for the most part, people in the Parkinson's community are just really happy that Parkinson's is getting mentioned, and not in a pitying way.
I wouldn't have wanted to miss the opportunity to make those three films that didn't do well. They were really important to me, and the things I learned doing them were important to me.
I'm also very proud to be a part of a trilogy of films that, if they do nothing else, allow people to check their problems at the door, sit down and have a good time.
To be brutally honest, for much of that time, I was the only person in the world with Parkinson's. Of course, I mean that in the abstract. I had become acutely aware of people around me who appears to have the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, but as long as they didn't identify with me, I was in no rush to identify with them. My situation allowed, if not complete denial, at least a thick padding of insulation.
As with any turning point or instance when a new road is chosen and an old one forsaken, there are consequences.
My notion of spirituality was different than it is now, but even if I'd been the most fundamentalist of believers, I would have assumed that God had better things to do than arbitrarily smite me with shaking palsy.
The moment I understood this - that my Parkinson's was the one thing I wasn't going to change - I started looking at the things I could change, like the way research is funded.
The thing that brings people to wail at a wall, or face Mecca, or to go to church, is a search for that feeling of purity.
The 'Rescue Me' gig was a unique opportunity to play a character - a misanthropic, angry guy - who was so contrary to how people think of me.
My whole life, meeting people is like a blind date, because I feel like they've already seen the video on me.
I worked very hard on those movies but there was some creative connection that wasn't being made.
I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an activist, I'm a writer and I'm just a student of the world.
It is ironic that in the same year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, some would have us ban certain forms of DNA medical research. Restricting medical research has very real human consequences, measured in loss of life and tremendous suffering for patients and their families.
I love the irony. I'm perceived as being really young and yet I have the clinical condition of an old man.
I'm not a shill for the Democratic Party.
Just as Parkinson's isn't a big topic of conversation in my house, neither is my career.
When I was 20, I would have taken a bullet in the head to never have to be 35.
