I love boxing. I really respect the guys and admire the guys who do it. But, I'm very, very happy with my career as an actor. I made the right choice and things are really working out for me right now, but I won't pretend that there isn't a part of me that always secretly wanted to be a boxer.

You can get into a place in your life where you no longer are in control of events, and events are in control of you.

If you're going to play a champion athlete, people expect you to look a certain way, and you also have to have the stamina to be able to continue to perform.

You make choices, as a young man. I knew I wanted to be an actor, so I pursued that, but the desire to compete still stayed with me.

You think like a boxer and behave like a boxer, and you try to live your life that way, being in the gym all the time and being careful to push the plate away at the dinner table. You don't need dessert. When you're out having fun, you ask for agua instead of vodka. It's very important.

Boxing is a place where, if you haven't done the training, that's going to be exposed very quickly.

I watched tapes and became a historian of the sport, and tried to combine certain elements and find things in the gym and saw what worked for me.

You have to really think about what kind of guy the character is and decide on a style that works, that complements my physicality and that's going to be believable, but also be compelling for the audience and for the camera.

I had always wanted to play a boxer, all of my life. I grew up watching great boxing films.

As an actor, you very rarely have the experience of picking up a script and getting a few pages into it and realizing that what you're holding in your hands is not just a role on a TV show, but it's one of those special parts that comes along, once or twice in a career. If you're lucky, you get an opportunity to do something really memorable and to be part of one of those rare shows that passes into that special category.