When I decided to devote my life to acting one Tuesday evening a long time ago at the dinner table when my mother asked me what I wanted to study at college, I think I recognized at the time it was probably not the wisest idea in terms of bettering my chances at having a fulfilling career, or a comfortable existence, or a happy life in general. It did seem to ensure that the future would always be interesting, and that was enough for me.

I think of that at times when I find myself in situations that, especially when taken out of context, are ones that very few people ever get to (or have to) experience. Changing clothes in a room full of other people also changing clothes, for instance. Or being a man with a full makeup job on his face. Trying to decide whether to tell Robert De Niro that he has a piece of spinach in his teeth. That last one never happened to me, but it could.

Some of the most surreal moments of my life have been while shooting scenes for some short film or while performing in some play or another. Just last weekend I had the unique and strangely enjoyable pleasure of getting to throw a handful of chocolate pudding with bits of corn in it at a wall in someone’s apartment. It was for a shot in a five-minute film that a friend of mine asked me to be in, and when they needed someone to hoist the pudding, I was the first one to raise my hand. How often does one get the chance to throw a handful of pudding at someone else’s wall? And to top it all off, I then got to watch other people clean it off. Look, here they are:



And then I got to do it again, because you never do anything just once in film.

Another of my most cherished memories of pure surrealism also came as a result of helping a friend who was shooting a short film, and strangely enough, it also involved chocolate pudding. My friend Keith attended a local film school a few years ago, and he came up with a very high concept idea for his class project. It’s a long story, and I don’t fully remember the reasons and I’m not really sure that I ever did to be honest, but one scene required me to be:

1) Standing on the helipad of the Jurassic Park 2 set at Universal Studios
2) Dressed in a kilt
3) Carrying a bag of golf clubs
4) Mixing a bowl of chocolate pudding that I had cradled in my arms
5) Screaming at the top of my lungs like I was really, really angry.

I was sick with a slight fever that day, which gave the whole thing that extra bit of a dreamlike haze. Not to mention the fact that from my place on the helipad, my view consisted of a giant fake iceberg in a big sunny field, and, beyond that, the house from Psycho. Trams full of people taking the Universal Studios tour kept going by, and I could barely make out the miniature faces of the stunned Midwesterners far below looking up at me as I furiously mixed the pudding, screaming in my kilt. Good times.

These beautiful and strange moments are unfortunately few and far between, but these and times like them are the reason that I’ve never regretted the decision I made back then, at a time in my life when I was far too young to realize the true consequences of such a decision. In a way, I believe that the only good time to decide what to do with your life is before you become aware of what’s at stake if you screw it all up.