I'm actually the last person to ask about school. I kinda ducked out at 12, before all that stuff might have happened. I left school after sixth grade and was basically home-schooled after that.
It's definitely a shock to go from being 15 in high school to working. There's no real cushion there. There's no preparation at all. You learn by doing.
It's actually really great to be a student and an actor, because I get to do this job that I love, then just when I think my head might explode, I get to go to school where they don't really care about what magazine cover I'm on.
I had to act in a school play when I was about ten years old. I really didn't want to do it. But everyone had to do it so I didn't have a choice. A talent agent came and watched it and later gave me some work. It's funny because I'd always known that I wanted a movie career. I just didn't think that I would be in the movies.
I could be happy doing something like architecture. It would involve another couple of years of graduate school, but that's what I studied in college. That's what I always wanted to do.
The first two pictures I did, I played a young student in prep school. When I did Lifeguard, everyone was saying, You're so Southern California. It was a surprise to me.
In 1975 I decided that there was no future in flying (airline jobs were impossible to get, and who wants a job where you are judged only by seniority?) and headed off to grad school.
To the Kenyan families, school doesn't really matter because none of them are going on to college. Almost all of drop out of school and so, they're spending their time learning things that are important to them.
In other words, unlike some people with new theories, we will go out, we'll go into a school and we get products and the products are evaluated, whether it's by teachers or others. The scores are quantified and then we compare performances.
If there's going to be an SAT, it's probably practical to invest in a book or perhaps in a course, but I'm sorry to say, I went to some classes that my kids took and it was clear in school that what they were doing was just SAT training.
