You kind of got your start doing voiceover work with your father. Was it your father's radio station, if I remember correctly?

Well, it was. I did eventually do a summer or two as a disc jockey at what had been my dad's radio station many, many years ago, but he had his own recording studio and would sometimes use me and my sister when he needed the voices of kids. That's where I got my start, just recording commercials for my dad and he would pay us. So that was good.

Do you know if any of those ads are out there circulating?

Gosh, I have no idea. I've never, I've never sought them out, but that's a good question.

So in between all your acting, you spent a year as a high school teacher. How did that come about?

Well, when I left, after I graduated from North Carolina School of the Arts, I went to Houston and worked at the Alley Theatre down there in their apprentice program. And I left kind of disenchanted because I thought I was going to sort of be moved into their repertory company, even though they didn't officially have one, but I sort of left disenchanted and my high school drama teacher and mentor and still a good friend, Frank Bluestein, said, "Hey, you want to come back and teach for a year?" Because it was my school that I had gone to and I was teaching acting and film and video and helping out with the theater and television studio, all these things I'd done when I was there.

So yeah, I tried it for a year and I loved working with all the kids after school, on the plays and the musicals and the TV productions, but the regular day-to-day teaching was awful. It was so hard. I mean, I was like in my mid-twenties, not ready to be an authority figure, not really having a sense at all of how to apply discipline in the classroom. As with any class it felt like there were a small group of students who were very dedicated and really wanted to learn about whatever the subject was. And then there's sort of the bulk of them that are just like, "eh, okay, whatever." And then there were a few who were a-holes, who just wanted to make trouble and made a lot of trouble for the 25- or 26-year-old me. So I couldn't do that for very long.

And then I also just realized, If I'm going to try to be an actor, I've got to really give it a shot, working as an apprentice for a theater for one season doesn't really count. So that's when I decided to head out to old L.A.