On 'Old School,' I was not an actor, I was Snoop Dogg, so I came to the set with a whole different vibe, and a different crew of people. And on 'Starsky and Hutch,' I was more of an actor. I wasn't Snoop Dogg, the rapper.
It wasn't until 9th grade that I got into music. This guy in school heard me singing around the hallway to girls and stuff. The girls liked it. One day, he was like, 'Come to my crib. I got a studio. Come and record a hook for me.' I recorded the hook on the 'Lovers & Friends' beat - Usher.
By the time I was a young man, I lived with two deep struggles: I longed to become a cricketer, and I performed miserably in school. Cricket and tennis were all that I lived for. In India, this was a formula for failure.
It's pretty challenging in a small country to develop a business school with a world-class reputation because of the problem of attracting a critical mass of top-class researchers.
I think it's fairly unique to define the end goal of K-12 schooling as helping students become better thinkers, more creative thinkers, and to organize the whole school around creative and critical thinking.
Probably around 14, when I was finishing primary school. I'm coming from a pretty small city in Croatia, not too many options to train, not too many players. So I had to either choose to stay at home to do more school or move to Zagreb to the national training center. That was when I made decisions to do something better in tennis.
I'm a first - I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist. I was really interested in piano and sort of discovered that I was a writer when I was about 13 and started writing.
I ran track. I ran cross country. But I did not play organized basketball in high school, at least on our team. But I played a lot of sports.
I went to a performance of 'The Crucible' at the Guthrie when I was a sophomore in high school, and I knew right away that that's what I wanted to do.
I went to the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, where I had a teacher really named Edward Shakespeare. He was a very influential figure in my childhood - I acted in high school a few times, but Mr. Shakespeare got me to lead in 'The Crucible.' I played John Proctor.
I was going to play pro baseball. That was the dream. But in my sophomore year of high school a teacher who knew I performed, singing in church, she said, 'You know we have a speech team,' and she handed me a copy of 'The Crucible.'
In my last year of drama school, I was Abigail in 'The Crucible' and Nina in 'The Seagull,' and I did some Shakespeare with the RSC. That's what casting directors saw me in, and I got put up for a lot of period drama auditions. I always get told I suit the costumes. I don't think I have a very modern-looking face.
Somehow it seems that all parents are certain that they themselves were victims of abuse in school and that they will not allow this to happen to their children. Even though children can also be the cruelest group imaginable - especially the cutest of them.
The parents of teenagers would love to have a car that won't go very far or go very fast. They could just cruise around the neighborhood, drive it to school, see their friends, plug it in overnight.
I hate homework. I hate it more now than I did when I was the one lugging textbooks and binders back and forth from school. The hour my children are seated at the kitchen table, their books spread out before them, the crumbs of their after-school snack littering the table, is without a doubt the worst hour of my day.
If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.
You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it's the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there's not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.
I crushed high school. I was a huge dork.
I didn't know what gay was. There was no such thing when I was growing up. I knew I had crushes on boys, but I didn't think there was anything wrong with that until I started to hear about it from the other kids in school.
When I was a child I had something called Perthes' Disease which meant I was on crutches, so I was bullied at school and all that sort of stuff.
