In the military, you learn the essence of people. You see so many examples of self-sacrifice and moral courage. In the rest of life you don't get that many opportunities to be sure of your friends.
The only thing I know that makes me feel comfortable is to know as much as I can. Not like what the shots are going to be, but knowing enough about my character that I can forget those things. And more specifically, my lines. I have to know my lines. I have to know something really well, so I can forget it when we're doing it. And there is comfort in knowing, "Okay, there's not another stone that I could have overturned."
I actually run a non-profit where one of the main objectives is to branch out and get a new audience for the theater. Just because the writing is so good and nothing is more effective than seeing something live and happening right in front of your face, so I definitely want to continue to pursue that.
I always think back to the original movies and to those quieter moments where Luke is out in A New Hope, and there are the two suns setting. It is the equivalent, basically, of a farm boy dying to get out of his small town and do something bigger. It's those kinds of universal themes that ground this whole thing in space.
At the end of whatever we're doing, I always feel like I want to go back and start over again because now I have a better sense of what it is. I feel that with everything. Like, if you're doing like a long run of a play and you're doing it seven shows a week, at the end of it, I want to go back and start from the beginning.
Juilliard definitely emphasizes the theater. They don't train - at all really - for film acting. It's mostly process-oriented, pretty much for the stage.
The Marine Corps is some of the best acting training you could have. Having that responsibility for people's lives, suddenly time becomes a really valuable commodity and you want to make the most of it. And for acting, you just have to do the work, just keep doing it.