My father died in 1989 before I knew what I was going to do with my life. I had just graduated from college. My mother died just before Sideways came out. She knew I was an actor but she never saw me become successful.
Had my Dad lived, I might have done something different with my life. When he died it was a very destabilising experience for me in ways I can't even explain. He was a very powerful figure, president of Yale University, a professor of English renaissance literature, very academic; super-charismatic; solid. And then he moved into the administration of major league baseball, so it was a very curious sort of career trajectory. He died just like that. A heart attack at 50. His death threw everybody for a big loop.
I had just graduated from Yale – in English – and thought about going into academic life, though I don't think I would have been suited to it. It is because my dad died suddenly that I became an actor. I thought, I'm going to make money doing this thing I enjoy.
Home was New Haven, Connecticut. Academia is a rarified culture, especially an Ivy League academic background. There were books all over the place and my mother was a big reader. It's a curious thing growing up in academia. I have this funny working knowledge of medieval literature although I haven't read any of it. I just absorbed it through my father – by osmosis. I know stuff about Chaucer, for example, that I just picked up because it was around.
I was the youngest child and got a lot more freedom than my brother and sister. I used to wander, doing my own thing under the radar, but I didn't get in bad, bad trouble. It was nothing criminal. I wasn't big with drugs (I did that later), but I think in some ways my way of rebelling was being a bit of a fuck-off in school. I knew I was a smart kid. My way of rebelling was just going "screw it". I wasn't a great student.
My Dad's dad was from Naples. Religion features more now in my life than it did when I was a kid – my Dad rejected the Catholic church as a young man. I had no religious upbringing but certainly Dad was a kind-of secular humanist. I don't know if he was an atheist or agnostic. I regret I didn't talk to him about it. My mum didn't have any formal religion but she was superstitious. In a crunch she would pray. To cover her ass, she would believe.
As an actor, to have achieved financial stability is amazing. But I always have this weird fear that I'm not going to get any more work; it's about not having enough money. I don't know why, We grew up comfortably middle class. It's not like I've been poor. I just think it comes from a sense of insecurity that at any time my career could stop. I worry about it. I wouldn't discourage my son from acting but neither would I encourage it actively. Sam is interesting, a funny combination of being a little shy and sometimes enjoying stuff like acting. He's a really good kid, he's a lot of fun. He likes to read and watch movies like I did at his age. Fatherhood is OK.
I consider myself an atheist. My wife is Jewish. And I'm fine with my son being raised as a Jew. He's learning Hebrew and is really into it. I will talk to my own son about my atheism when the time is right. But there's a great tradition of Jewish atheism, there are no better atheists in the world than the Jews.
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