“The one thing my parents wanted was for me to be a huge star. My dad quit his job, and they spent all their time managing me and my career. I paid the bills. Everything depended on me. There were no choices in my life, no normal childhood activities. I was either on set working or memorizing lines or with one of my instructors for acting, dancing, or singing. Nobody asked me if I was doing what I wanted. Or if I was happy. Nobody cared.”

That made my heart break. I’d never imagined when I’d watched him as Felix that he’d been unhappy. “I’m so sorry.”

He raised one hand, as if to wave off my sympathy. “It got worse when I was a teenager. I rebelled in the worst ways possible. I was a mess, totally acting out and partying all the time. The day I turned eighteen I got married, just to prove I was an adult.”

Oh, I remembered. My fifteen-year-old heart had been entirely broken when he’d married one of his costars. A voodoo doll of his bride may or may not have been constructed.

“I just wanted to show them that they couldn’t control me anymore. And they took my challenge seriously. They tried to get control back. They attempted to get a court to declare me incompetent and give them a conservatorship over me.”

I gasped. I’d had no idea. “Who would do that?”

“My parents. They didn’t want their cash cow to wander off into another field. It made me wake up and I realized I had to be out of their reach. I stopped partying, got my marriage annulled, and did what anyone in my position would do—I met with my local army recruiter and signed up.”

I smiled slightly at his joke. “That couldn’t have been easy.”

“That’s why I wanted it. I needed something hard, something authentic. I’d never lived in the real world with real problems, and I wanted it more than anything. To be my own man and be in a place where I’d be treated just like everyone else. My goal was to become an Army Ranger. If I was going to be in the military, I was going to be the best.”

More than one director had talked about his incredible work ethic. I wondered if it was something his parents had instilled in him or if he’d found it in the military. “What happened? Why did you leave?”

“Because they made me,” he said with a wry smile. “We were deployed to Afghanistan, and when we arrived, on our way to the base, we hit an IED. The blast pressure caused me to have a pneumothorax.”

I was both horrified and enthralled. “What is that?”