I always wanted to tell stories. Well, at least, I always came back to the notion of storytelling when the glitz and glamour of being a special effects designer or a fighter pilot or a DEA agent wore off.
A lot of the characters I end up playing have a certain degree of glamour or sexiness, but I like it when you can have some other element that makes it much more interesting.
Returning to South Carolina meant getting a normal job in a normal town with normal people and marrying a normal person. I wanted the glamour and opportunity of the world.
I like to style myself, as my first job out of university was working at 'Vogue' magazine in NYC, and I grew up attending the collections with my mother, so I have a particular aesthetic, which is classic glamour with a twist.
I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.
We were probably the last people in the country to get a VCR and we didn't have cable. There wasn't any admiration of glamour, no, 'I want to look like them or have that lifestyle', because everyone in my town had the same lifestyle. So I didn't think, 'Ooh, a movie star's birthday!' I just thought, 'What?'