Dean Cain on His Journey From Trailer Park to Princeton to Hollywood

Automatic TRANSCRIPT

So dean, your life has been so fascinating. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about just kind of your journey before we talk about more of the news stuff. I saw that you spent some of your childhood in Michigan and then in California. And in high school, when you were in Santa Monica, you were excelling in sports, and you even played some baseball with Charlie Sheen and Rob Lowe. Is that correct? And what was that like? It's mostly correct. I grew up, so I grew up in I was born in Michigan, but I moved to California when I was three. My mom up and took off with her two kids. Her first husband was my biological father. It was not an ideal husband, was philandering and so she left and came out to LA to be an actress with two kids to the Asian kids. And we looked more on my given name as Tanaka. So she came out here with us too, and met and fell in love with my dad. Who she married a year later. And then through a really terrible story actually, a woman was raped and I believe killed in an apartment next to us or right near us. And then the next day myself and a couple other guys, my brother and another couple kids were out playing cops and robbers as they used to back in the day. And I was the youngest and so I wasn't able to have I didn't get to a gun. So I went looking for something and I found the real gun and it was apparently the weapon that was used and that day my dad borrowed, I don't ten, $12,000 from his parents in South Dakota and moved us to a trailer park in Malibu. And I grew up in a trailer park in Malibu, which sounds, you know, like trailer park. Yeah, but it was in Malibu. So we'd spend our days outside all day long on the beach, running around, and I grew up with kids like Sean Penn, Chris Penn Rob Lowe, Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez, all those kids were just, we were all just part of this one little Malibu group. I guess all our parents were involved in the business, not all of them, but in some way or another. And so through this weird happenstance, those kids all ended up being actors. Now I played baseball Charlie for a long time. Rob, rob was never the great athlete. Rob even back in the elementary school was just all the girls loved him and he's so pretty. And he loved the girls back. So that was the that was the skinny and rob, so to speak. Charlie very good baseball player. Played on teams with him forever. And then went to high school, Santa Monica high school. And I was a good athlete student. It worked out real well for me. A lot of the kids are madly when they got to Santa Monica worked able to compete at that level, unfortunately. So a lot of the kids stopped playing sports, Charlie continued to play for a while. I don't even know what he did to seeing it if he played a scene here or not. And then I was lucky enough to with my grades and thank you to get the president of the university, had a wonderful career at Princeton. Grew up a lot turned into him and went from a boy to a man there and played very well. I played football. I mean, football ran track and I played volleyball. And then I got a chance to play for the Buffalo Bills afterward, which was great. And got hurt right away. And then it's been acting and directing and filmmaking ever since.

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