Growing up Mormon, you learn how to be very, very organized, and it's a passionate group. I mean, in that way, it's prepared me very well for Hollywood.

You know, growing up Mormon, I always got the sense that it was hard for the leaders of the church to feel like they were outside of Christianity. I think, you know Mormon people believe that they are Christian, and a lot of people outside of the Mormon Church, you know, don't see them that way.

Mom got very heated about the new government policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. In her view it was going to allow closeted gay people into her military and she was really against it... she just assumed I agreed with her opinions.

Eventually my courageous Mom did something we do all too rarely. She got on a plane and she came to see me in L.A. - this place where we'd always been told sinners lived. She came to see my gay friends.

My first memory of the Rolling Stones is listening to 'Satisfaction' at a sixth-grade slumber party at a friend's house in Ankara, Turkey, where my family was living at the time. In the middle of our sleepover, my friend's dad stopped the record when he heard the words 'girlie action!'

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women - 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data - is practically absurd and morally indefensible.

My family got all over me because they said Bush is only for the rich people. Then I reminded them, 'Hey, I'm rich'.

I think what's most important is family.