Recently, my dad has been teaching me a lot - like how to read a script. It used to just be about hockey or baseball or sports of whatever. We don't have glitzy or glamour-y Hollywood-type talk, like, 'Isn't that person great?' It's more about the process of how it works.
I was in Toronto with my parents, and my dad took me to an outdoor hockey rink. I was 3 or 4, and I just remember everything about that day. For some reason, I thought, 'This is it. This is what I'm supposed to do.' And this is around the time that Gretzky came to L.A., so I immediately joined a hockey league.
I got hurt when I was 19. They thought I broke my neck. I couldn't move my hands or feet, and I had a very bad experience.
I was a hockey player. I played hockey forever. That was my life and my job until I got injured, so I get sports, and I get the sports atmosphere, the feeling around other athletes, but I never played football.
My parents are actors and never brought work home. I didn't even know what they did until I was about 10 years old. We never talked about it.
I went on an audition. I walked in the room, and it was Leslie Mann with Judd Apatow. It was intimidating.
In hockey, it was a freak show. I'm the son of actors and from California, and in Canada, hockey is a religion, so me coming in, it was like, 'Who the hell is this guy?' I just had to put my head down and work really hard, and it was difficult, but it made me who I am and gave me a backbone.
I had been pulling my groins in college a lot and missed my whole freshman year of college because of groin pulls. It was chronic, and I couldn't figure it out. I went to the doctor, and he told me I had hip dysplasia. So I knew my hockey days were sorta limited at that point.
Acting was something fun that my dad did, but baseball is what he really wanted to do.
The last thing I wanted to do was act, because it was the path of least resistance.
Acting was what everybody thought I should do, and at 15, when you love something so much, it's like - 'That's not what I do. That's what they do.'
In hockey, there are no second chances, but the great thing about acting is that there actually are. If you do a scene and you think you can do better - take two!
Having parents that have been through the wars of films and having a brother and sister who have done it at the highest level, you gain an appreciation. But we've always had closeness as a family. That's our anchor.
The Russell side of my family is a clan with some serious genetics.
When you're an athlete, you've got the horse blinders on pretty thick. Your exploration of other things in life tends to be limited because you have to have such a focus on what you're doing. I wasn't a good enough player to stray from that focus and still keep my ability.
No one wants to watch anybody play baseball in a movie. What is interesting is what baseball means or sports in general means to those people doing it.
I've done two movies with Jim Mickle. He's somebody that I'd love to do another movie with.
'Boy' is one of my top-five favorite movies of all time.
My dad, in the best way possible - not in an intimidating way, but with the physically intimidating qualities that every father has - can truly be scary. The only time you saw that side of him, the raw side of him, would be in a moment when you truly were the one that screwed up.
I would consider my dad a pretty patient guy, but there was no tolerance for spoiled behavior.
