My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment - my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.
Everyone has a family, even if they're at war or fallen apart. It's the closest initial bond, and there's a sort of primal element to that. Your primary relationships are formed out of family.
My mother, God bless her, forced me to take touch typing when I was 16.
I've been touching instruments since the day I was born. My mother is Brazilian, and she listens to Brazilian music. My father was a musician, and I've seen pictures of him when he was in a band playing guitar and piano. He loved country music, Frank Sinatra, and stuff like that.
One of my dad's friends from the music industry came over to our house one time and heard me sing, and he said, 'She should audition for this role I have!' So I did! It was a movie called 'The Gospel,' which I did when I was five. That was when I was like, 'I want to do this acting thing!'
My first memories of religion were being taken to Episcopal church. My father was Catholic, but my mother, I believe, was Episcopal. So I sort of veered off into the watered-down version of Catholicism.
My parents wanted to name me Karim Hill. My aunt always liked the name Dule, from this actor Keir Dullea, who was in '2001: Space Odyssey.' That's how I got the name Karim Dule Hill. Growing up, I never liked the name Karim because people would ask me, 'Could you dunk like Kareem Abdul Jabbar?'
I have never been a Conservative, or at least not since being a young teenager. My father voted Conservative, and even his doing that was a hangover from the '50s and '60s, which may have been an influence on me.
An important impression was my father's one Sabbatical year, spent in England and Europe in 1937.
My mother gave up her career bringing us up, and she has played a very important role in keeping us grounded. Even now I don't take my work home, my stardom home. It ends where it is supposed to end. There is a life beyond stardom, and it's a very normal life which I cherish. I anyway don't handle attention very well.
Both my parents are Catholic and staunch believers. I'm not a Catholic now, but I still carry part of it with me.
My family, frankly, they weren't folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn't raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead.
I kind of modeled Optimus Prime's voice out of many people I had known over the years, my family especially.
I have my real name and RJ. I've gone by RJ since I was eight, but I was named Roy after my grandfather. They called me Little Roy, which sounded like Leroy with a Texas accent, but my mom didn't want to have a Leroy as a son, so it went to RJ.
My dad is quite possibly the biggest Giants fan in the world. I believe he wore a Phil Simms jersey to my high school and college graduations.
The foundations of national morality must be laid in private families.
My grandma always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew.
When I was growing up, my parents were almost involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.
I grew up in a working class family. People thought I might go work at a mill. My mom wanted me to learn how to lay carpet because she was concerned about my future. Nobody had high hopes for me. But I was a hustler.
I'm so jealous of my friends who came from these super musical households where they were learning piano at three years old. My parents didn't really play loads of music around the house. We had the radio, but they weren't teaching me about music.
My father was a police officer before he retired. One of my brothers is also a police officer, and I think they kind of expected I would do something along those lines, like become a fireman or something.
Too many women are forced to abort by poverty, by their menfolk, by their parents. A choice is only possible if there are genuine alternatives.
I did grow up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, around a lot of my mom's family. I had a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles around me, and my sisters and my brother. Probably the most formative part of it was that we grew up on the edge of a forest. It wasn't a big forest, but it was enough. When you're a kid, it feels gigantic.
I was always a performer kid - like, annoyingly so. I would put on shows for my family and direct my friends in little plays, and my little sister, I'd make up dances with her. But when I was 12, that was when I started taking it seriously, and my mom for some reason believed in me and helped me find an agent in Cleveland, which did nothing for me.
I'm a surfer at heart. Both my parents moved to Hawaii in the 1970s, where they met and became Christians. Then they taught me and my two brothers how to love the Lord - and how to surf!
