When I got to Harvard just after the release of Star Wars: Episode 1. I knew I would be starting over in terms of how people viewed me. I feared people would have assumed I’d gotten in just for being famous, and that they would think that I was not worthy of the intellectual rigor here. And it would not have been far from the truth. When I came here I had never written a 10-page paper before. I’m not even sure I’ve written a 5-page paper. I was alarmed and intimidated by the calm eyes of a fellow student, who came here from Dalton or Exeter who thought that compared to high school the workload here was easy. I was completely overwhelmed, and thought that reading 1000 pages a week was unimaginable, that writing a 50-page thesis is just something I could never do. I had no idea how to declare my intentions. Icouldn’t even articulate them to myself.
I’ve been acting since I was 11. But I thought acting was too frivolous and certainly not meaningful. I came from a family of academics, and was very concerned of being taken seriously. In contrast to my inability to declare myself, on my first day of orientation freshman year, five separate students introduced themselves to me, by saying, I’m going to be president. Remember I told you that. Their names, for the record, were Bernie Sanders, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Barack Obama, and Hilary Clinton. In all seriousness, I believed every one of them, their bearing and self-confidence alone seemed proof of their prophecy where I couldn’t shake my self-doubt. I