Photo: Chad Hurst/Getty
Milo Ventimigliaonce nearly gave up on Hollywood — to be a farmer in Italy.
“I’ve had moments where I’ve had to pick myself up. Probably in my early 30s, I couldn’t get hired in town. I really couldn’t,” theThis Is Usstar shared in anAccessinterview this week. “That was back in theHeroesdays. I did not work for one calendar year. One entire year, I couldn’t get a job.”
Ventimiglia said that he “absolutely” considered quitting the business during the rough patch following his role on hit dramaHeroes, which aired from 2006 to 2010.
“I was really having to re-evaluate what I was going to be doing because, you know, it’s a profession,” he toldAccess. “You need to feed yourself and clothe yourself and have a roof over your head. I was starting to see those things minimize.”
Milo Ventimiglia onHeroes.Paul Drinkwater/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty
He did, however, have an adventurous plan in mind if he decided to leave the entertainment industry altogether. “I was gonna cash in and move to Italy on my European passport and find a farm to work on and buzz my head, and grow a beard and ride a motorcycle, and just live a quiet life,” Ventimiglia said.
He was “pretty close” to hopping on a plane when he started to get cast again — in a film he produced calledStatic, inKiss of the Damnedand inThat’s My Boy.
Ventimiglia also thought about becoming a mechanic, he told Cagle.
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“I was going to go be an auto mechanic,” he said. “In Southern California there’s this auto school and it’s advertised ‘Everybody needs mechanics, because they need those cars fixed’ and I’m like, ‘That’s a job that’s going to be in demand, so why don’t I learn more than I already know about cars and professionally fix cars.’”
Ventimiglia said that he was demoralized again after losing 28 lbs. for a part inThe Divideand still finding that “people only saw me as [Heroescharacter] Peter Petrelli.”
“It broke my spirit,” he explained to Cagle. “Because that show itself, toward the end, it felt like the world-ending engine was more important than the human experience of it, which is what the show started as. It kind of just broke me inside and I thought to myself ‘Do I really want to do this? Do I want to continue acting? Because it may just be disappointment after disappointment after disappointment.’”
As his fame and his offers skyrocket, Ventimiglia has a philosophy that keeps him going. “I look at it like I’m a shark that just has to keep swimming or I die,” he noted toAccess. “So if I stop, if I stop for a moment to understand where I am or how I’m here or what I’ve done to get here — no, no, no just be here.”
“Just be here,” he added to the outlet. “Be here in this exact moment that you’re in right now because nothing else matters.”
source: people.com
