It was a spectacular fall morning in Manhattan when I walked into an agent’s office for the first time. Getting there, to New York and to professional acting, was eight years in the making. Those years were marked by a fairly predictable pattern: See the challenge. Meet the challenge. Actually see the challenge. Run like a water lizard away from the challenge. Accidentally grow.

Let me explain.

I spent most of my formative years in rural Oregon. After my father passed away, in 1989, I fell pretty hard for theater as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon. Before he died, he planted the seed that maybe I should look into performing. In his words: “I really think you should have a talk show.” Living out in the woods of Oregon, he might as well have said: “I really think you should have another arm.”

I took a leap of faith. A leap of his faith in me, really. And it turned out that theater was the only thing I had ever had a knack for, aside from sports, and in theater I didn’t get hit in the face with things (much).

But when fear got the best of me, I chose to move back home and enroll at a smaller school, Southern Oregon University, where I could “focus on theater.” (It takes a very particular set of talents to convince oneself that choosing to live with your mother is ambitious. I pulled it off.) There, from 1992 to 1994, I found an even more rigorous training program and even higher stakes — the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in Ashland.