When I was little, I wanted to be a civil engineer. Not a ballerina, not a doctor, a civil engineer. I was such a nerd.

I never wanted to be an actress, really. I sort of caught the bug fairly late. So many people are so intrigued with the glamour and celebrity of acting, and a lot of actors start acting when they are 9 or 10 years old - so young. I started when I was about 24.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a civil engineer. No joke. I would come home from school and build bridges out of toothpicks and see how much weight they would hold before falling.

I love Spain. It's my favorite country that I've been to and I've traveled quite a bit. I've been really fortunate as an adult to have been to a lot of interesting places like Egypt and China.

My mother wrote lyrics and sang but was overtaken by life with four children and worked.

My family is a Jewish Iranian family, but I was born in Turkey and raised in Italy. So it's a very mixed background.

We all need that extra friend outside of our immediate family to talk about that extra stuff you wouldn't normally talk to your parents about.

A lot of parents tell their children that if they want to be an actor, that's fine, but they should do something else first, so they've got something to fall back on. It doesn't work like that, as far as I'm concerned.