Put all the menus and TV guides and magazines and local info papers in the drawers. I hate clutter!
— Chris Wood
A quiet, non-attention grabbing, 'Hey, just wanted to say that I enjoy your work' is perfect.
I did a severe amount of plays in high school. I was in every single show that my drama club produced. Then in the summer I would do plays, and I was also playing sports. I was probably a hellish kid, come to think of it, for my parents' schedule. But then I went to college in North Carolina.
Kai was always dead and gone. That was always the plan. That was the plan when I signed on for the role. That was the plan once I was talking to Julie when the role was coming to a close. It was always, 'He dies and is actually gone.'
I did a lot of musicals growing up.
It wasn't until 2013 that I even started working in film. It was always something I wanted to do from six, but I didn't know how to get there other than working really hard and going to New York and doing theater like I saw on the bios of some of my favorite actors.
I miss the simplicity of college, with specific due dates, a consistent schedule, and a solid routine.
I left 'Containment' for the first time understanding the exhaustion some people have after they've done a really demanding emotional and physical project. I wanted a break, to be honest with you, and I needed to recover.
Any other illness, any other disease that we're faced with, there's sympathy and understanding. We get help for those. With mental illness, our go-to is to categorize them as, 'Oh, they're crazy,' to belittle the problem.
Hopefully, everyone has the same feeling I do when they perform. I get such a thrill from getting to play make believe. My favorite place to be is trying to be somebody else.
I play rec softball sort of religiously. I'm a huge baseball fan. When I lived in New York City, I'd go to a Yankees game every week.
I guess each of my roles on the network have been so different. It's great to be entrusted with such interesting, unique, and completely separate characters.
I got a card in the mail from a close college friend saying that she was proud of me and what I've been doing. It was very sweet and honest. Nobody writes letters anymore, so when you get one in the mail, it feels very special.
It was a natural progression for me to find that if acting was what made me most comfortable, the best thing for me to progress toward was television and film.
When you get a character that you're just starting to work on, it's the most exciting and most terrifying feeling because you have endless hours of diving in, researching, reading, and decision-making.
I've done many body scans. Every time your character fights in a different look, they'll rescan you. Because my character has taken so long to get a super suit, every time Mon-El fights, he's in something different.
I never feel like I'm looking to get away from my own self. Not as much as I'm trying to get inside the mind of somebody else.
When they sold me on 'Supergirl', I went and sat down with Andrew Kreisberg and Greg Berlanti, and they described the character to me. Greg Berlanti used a couple of music theater references to kind of explain who the character was. They threw up Chris Pratt in 'Guardians of the Galaxy' as a reference point.
I only hope that people understand that if I've just come from the gym or am fresh off a red-eye flight and look like a sweaty mess, I might not be super keen on photo ops!
Six years is a long time to play the same characters on the same show.
I've just always sort of been mesmerized by our minds and how people think and how people react differently.
I was one of those weirdos who, at six years old, was telling everybody that I wanted to be an actor. I saw my sister in a play and realized that I wanted to play make believe in front of people; I was always goofing around and putting on shows for my family.
I studied religions and all kinds of other things in college. I took a Shakespearean villain course for English literature. It was really intense. I think that sort of rounds a person. In this business, it's really important for us to be interesting... and have interests.
Sometimes you hate villains, but you love that you hate them, and it finds this happy medium where you enjoy the process of loathing them so much that you want them to be there. It's such a weird, twisted thing that our minds do.
I prefer to make my own coffee at home because I love the experience of measuring out the beans and finding the right grind setting, messing with water amounts, etc. It's truly an art form, and I'm obsessed with it. In L.A., I love Blue Bottle and Intelligentsia and used to hang at Bru in Los Feliz.
I went to Elon University and studied musical theater. I usually did two musicals a year, but I also did a couple of plays. That was sort of always where I felt the most relaxation.
Kai was my longest arc that I had done on a show, so it was a big step forward to me.
I play Captain Lance Van Der Berg, who's a Union captain who ends up staying with the Confederate family who's been taken over by the army when they come into the city in Virginia. He strikes up a romance with the youngest daughter in the house, which obviously causes some issues for the family.
I think that I'm lucky in that, even at levels where I, by and large, wasn't making enough money to sustain my life, I worked as a male nanny, I waited tables and did what I had to, to keep doing theater and acting.
The sexiest thing my girlfriend has ever done for me is when she planned three full days of events, meals, and surprises for my birthday. It was like one continuous gift.
I drink regular pour-over coffee, black. It's all about the beans. I'm always stocked at home with single-origin coffees from around the world, never more than two weeks old, kept in airtight containers.
I lost my father four years ago to what was the culmination of a manic episode that seemingly, to my family, came completely out of the blue after 59 years on this earth with no issues that we knew about, at least - sort of a normal run-of-the-mill guy who did his job and came home and had a family.
If I wasn't making a movie, I was trying to master a new musical instrument or trying to teach myself how to shave with a straight razor. I had to find the weirdest things just to increase my understanding of other cultures or other arts or intellectual pursuits.
If I get back into theater, I think I'd want to do a play. I enjoy singing, but it beats me up a bit. I get super paranoid and self-conscious about my voice.
I've sort of always been obsessed with telling stories and making things up.
Every character thinks differently, and every character has a different energy and way that they tick. But to find a character like Kai, who is so far that he doesn't even feel things, he is so different from me. That is the most exciting part.
