I'm no stranger to the physical aspects of the job doing the whole action-movie thing. But the mental aspect, it really beat me up and it took a long time for me to recover afterwards, to sort of get back to reality.

[About auditions:] I would like to say it gets easier. Truthfully, it doesn't. But I developed a strange kind of addiction to the process. Before each audition, I would stand outside the room and my nervous brain would try to enumerate all the reasons why I really didn't have to be there. Why I should just walk away. But afterwards, the relief of having done it was like nothing else. No matter how good or bad the audition was, the ecstatic adrenaline rush gave me a unique buzz. I might be back at square one in the acting world, but I was getting a kick out of it.

Oh, I agree he went mad in the end. It is the only explanation. Something must have snapped in that fine brain, and he saw the little bit more which we call madness. Thank God, you and I are prosaic fellows...

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep.

The excitement I underwent before the bout was something I’ll never forget. For a week I trained extra hard. I ran extra long distances. Every night when I went to bed I dreamed I was fighting. It was so clear – I would be going at it hot and heavy, then I would bring over a right hand and he would go down, the fight was over. Then the fight began. Here all the nervousness went out of me. I was doing what I wanted to do. It all seemed like something I had done many times before. And you know what? In the third round, just as I dreamed, I hit him with a hard right hand. Down he went and he didn’t get up. I had knocked him out.

I remember the casting session that I had where I was a break dancer, having this punk hair cut. They rejected me and I became really disillusioned with the business and said well this is what it's all about, and I haven't even got in to read a line. He said don't worry, some day we're going to get you back into this and it's going to happen for you, which I kind of took to heart. It was one of those situations where I was lucky and fortunate enough to be at the right places at the right time. All of a sudden I was on the set of Growing Pains and got this audition for This Boy's Life and was able to jump into the feature film world. It's really been just simply the fact that I'd been able to work, you know what I mean? I would probably still be trying to be an actor even if I was out of work, but I would probably become a little disillusioned at some point and move on to other things. But it's the one thing that I know that I love.

He was going mad and knew it

During one scene, I had to do a shooting drill. He put a psychological spin on it.

and we were started, and I fainted. Metaphorically, that is, because at this point my mind stopped and I switched one hundred per cent on to automatic, as had happened before on opening nights: you do all the things you’ve practised, like soldiers attacking a machine-gun nest, you switch your mind off and something takes over and does it all for you, provided – PROVIDED – you don’t think. Or even think about thinking. So when I was cued for my first line, the something did it for me. I was then taken to stand on my next mark, and when it was time for me to speak, it did my line for me again. At which point I was taken and put in front of another camera, and told my headmaster monologue was coming up in ten seconds and ‘Just look into the lens,’ and I stared at the Cyclops-like eye of this weird pile of ironwork, and the first line popped into my head, and the floor manager waved to cue me, and whatever it was started doing my lines for me.

"My first book, "Let Me Die Laughing," details my ordeal of having a "brain explosion" and recovering enough to hike and ride my bike on great adventures".

No, I was really excited about doing the stunts. I had never done an action film before and so, that was really exciting and appealing to me. And not to say that it was very easy, right? We definitely got banged up but it’s this sort of gratifying feeling of going home at the end of night and being like ‘I worked hard and look at that big bruise!’

I did all my fighting before the film started. I fought for the best director, the best lighting man. I was always conscious of how I looked.

Just getting auditions was rough. But also just learning how to act - when I did my first role, in a film I did which was a favour to a friend, I realised I was really bad at it.