I read two mysteries a day when I was a kid. All of Agatha Christie, all of 'Sherlock Holmes.' I've seen every single British detective show ever made.
My wife and I are just praying daily for our kids. We are trying to raise our kids to go all in for God. But I am keenly aware of this fact: If I hope to see my kids live an "all in" life for God, they must first see me doing it. My wife and I know that leading by example is going to be the loudest voice of influence in their lives. I've stopped trying to be a perfect parent, and instead I'm realizing that my kids aren't expecting me to be perfect, but they do need me to be present, focused on them, always making sure how much they know how much I love them and how much Jesus loves them.
My major goal is to take my bathrobe off before the kids get home from school.
All human stories are interesting. You don't put a kid in a show because you need a device. They have a story, too.
The one thing that will be the bane of my existence with my kid will probably be the way he or she is most like me in some ways.
I never go online on my iPhone. Sometimes I'm tempted but I remind myself and the kids - it's a tool. Use it as a tool. You're not the tool. My iPhone, 85% of the time I'm writing down ideas.
Every kid's dream is to be a great actor.
As a kid, as a young actor, I really wanted to pop. I wanted to create something different. I wanted to be Sean Penn, but I didn't have all the words to be Sean Penn. But I was trying to do something different in every role.
To me, the punk rock kids I grew up with were really, really smart, and to me, respecting those kids was a really big deal.
I was a short, chubby kid, pretty shy.
As you know, in this democracy, in order to have a healthy democracy, we have to get to the common good. But the only way to get to the common good is if we have a common set of facts, which we don't seem to have today, and we have a common level of decency. And my problem with the president and what happened today and why I think it affects the country as a whole is, first, we bring up our kids better than this. We teach them not to do this. We tell them not to do this, and it is not the right standard of behavior.
It's important for the character, over the course of six years, to have checked off all the different boxes of the things that Mindy Kaling is trying to learn about herself to see what she wants. Which are the things that she's dreamed of since she was a kid that will ultimately be still important to her as a fully integrated adult and which ones are maybe just fantasies.
L.A. can be pretty insane because there's so much show business here, but I also know a lot of kids who grew up in Manhattan who are some of the most normal, nicest people I know. Casting directors always say Chicago people are just nicer.
I was a bit of a troubled kid growing up, let's put it that way. I didn't take pleasure in hard work.
Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid - my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people.
I got injured when I was a kid, and it prevented me from becoming a footballer.
I feel a certain amount of freedom just cruising to the liquor store to get water or whatever. It just feels good. It makes me feel young getting on the bike and - again, not going crazy, I do bunny-hops and I'll hit some curbs and stuff - but just feeling like a kid again.
I was thinking about hitting races and stuff, but it's just, I think it's more of the era of when I was a kid and it just brings back memories. I gotta just chill and live in the past.
I played guitar when I was a kid, a little bit. I can tool around with a guitar, but I'm certainly not a musician.
The first idea of Captain Fantastic was a pretty radically different one. The genesis had to do with parenting and questions about parenthood and fatherhood specifically. I have two kids and I was grappling with what my values were and what I wanted to pass to my children. So I was positing different kinds of parents and different ways of parenting. I played with various ideas - very permissive parenting, very restrictive parenting and then I came up with the character of Viggo Mortensen, and much of it was aspirational, some of it was autobiographical.
I'm fortunate to have had my own level of success. My joys in life are I've got three little kids, and I got to buy a house that I really like, and everyone should have that.
I really like transgressive characters that have an alternate world view. I've actually written a fair number of kids movies, and I'll insert these kid-friendly articulate sociopaths who are usually yelling at the children for their own benefit.
You don't want to be slavishly doing the same thing over and over again that everybody else has done, but at the same time, you're conscious of, "This is important. I owe something to my ten year old self right now. I need to respect that." I need for that kid who is obsessively reading comic books, I need there to be something rewarding for him where he's like, I didn't waste my time. I know what this is.
When I was a kid I just had headphones on all the time, and it changed the way I see things and the way I interpret things.
As a kid, I wanted to be a pro tennis player. I was pretty good; at the tennis academies I attended, I always played up against older age groups.
