I lived for going down the rabbit hole of meeting weird people. Of course, come Monday I would be tallying up all the different situations, and each one was progressively more dangerous. I got lucky in that I didn't go to jail.
The reason I'm drawn to it is - both the off road racing and the motorcycles on the track - it takes a lot for me to quiet my brain and anything that requires 100% of my attention and focus I find very soothing and that is the closest I get to being content.
I've had plenty of good times and have settled peacefully into quite a boring existence that I love. I had enough fireworks and chaos. It is a blissful boring life, believe me.
I believe in making movies very inexpensively; I think that way too much money is spent on making movies. Enough movies are being made, but not enough experimental ones.
I'm an off-road racecar driver. And I think every woman in my life has told me that's not a sensible hobby. But when I was growing, even more than I wanted to be funny, I wanted to be a racecar driver. That's all I thought about. I worked for a race team when I was 15 and I traveled with them.
I think I'm a combination of very simple pleasures and the fact I've read a lot of books. I don't think it's a binary opposition across the board in humans and I think I'm an example that it's not. I'm hosting gay marriage rallies and I have tons of guns at home. There's a lot of middle ground in the world and I'm one of those people.
I was 20 when I moved to Los Angeles. I went on probably 600 commercial auditions and couldn't book any of them.
There's like a shift in the paradigm about every 15 years in movies because one would slip through the cracks. I think if they were more inexpensive you would see many more eclectic comedies being made.
What's great about TV, and what I love about being on 'Parenthood,' is you have this family. I'm now going on four years of working with the same 100 people, and that helps you feel like your life has more roots. It's more conducive to having a family, and you're staying in town. So that part is amazing.
But doing 'Parenthood,' I've never ever been happier in 35 years. I drive to work and I drive home. I'm like a factory worker and that is in my DNA. I love having a steady job with the same people. It's made me so much calmer and more content. Now I just hope the series goes on for 15 years.
They're making so few movies that you really just have to make it. It's going to be the only way you end up getting work. I don't believe anyone's going to really go out on a limb and just throw millions of dollars on someone that's not been proven. They're going to have to show somebody something at some point.
You can't put the Hollywood sign in a movie without paying them. That is a landmark in L.A. I'm sorry, remove it from our skyline, then. You know? How dare they. That should be public domain, right? But it's privately owned, and they enforce that. They sue people. If you see it in the movie, they've paid for that.
I've learnt that I've had the best results from just trying to be me, trying to make a movie or TV show I want to see or write a script I want to read, and that's really all I can offer - being authentic.
It's ironic, really. Guys should be excited that I got Kristen Bell. If Brad Pitt gets Kristen Bell, it's like, 'Well, of course he did.' With me, it should be, 'Oh good, a normal-looking guy got her. Maybe I'll get me a Kristen Bell.' But guys hate my guts for always dating women I have no right to be with.
Here's the funny thing about the response I've been aware of to my dating famous people: It's been very negative. I'm either not good-looking enough, not a good enough actor or not successful enough for these people.
I had just done a movie prior to 'Employee of the Month' called 'Let's Go to Prison' and Will Arnett got to play the bad guy. I would watch him daily and couldn't wait to get the chance 'til I played a bad guy.
I'm a writer; I've worked as much as a writer as I have as an actor, so I was in a script-note session at Imagine for a TV show I wrote that they were producing, and they happened to say, 'You'd be great as Crosby, do you want to do this show we're doing, 'Parenthood?'
We were doing press for this movie that my friends and I made for $5,000 called 'Brothers Justice,' that I also wrote and directed. And during the press of that, people kept saying, 'What's next, what's next?' And my best friend Nate and I - Nate produced it - we kept saying, 'Oh, we're gonna do a car-chase movie next.'