“I listened to Phil Collins and played hockey in the basement,” says actor Josh Duhamel, recalling his childhood in North Dakota after his parents divorced. The basement was a place where he secretly dreamt about acting but it took him more than a decade to follow his dream.

He studied biology, planned to become a dentist and moved first to Northern California before settling in Los Angeles. After modeling about a year – “I was really bad with that”, he says -he got his first acting job  at 27, in the soap opera All My Children .“It was a huge learning experience for me”, he told us.

 

His breakthrough role was on the TV show Las Vegas: Steven Spielberg saw an episode and recommended Duhamel for the role of Captain William Lennox in Transformers. After that, he has been in three other Transformers movies: Revenge of the Fallen, Dark of the Moon and The Last Knight. At the moment he plays detective Greg Kading in the TV show Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. and Simon’s father in the movie Love, Simon. His directorial debut, the “absurd but hilarious” The Buddy Games will be released later this year. 

 

Duhamel sat down with  HFPA journalist Helen Hoehne at the HFPA’s office and told us, among other things, why he thought his mother was old when she was 45, how his three sisters influenced him, why his father was a good role model, what happened when he wanted to thank Steven Spielberg, how he spends his free time in a remote cabin in the middle of the forest in Minnesota, and why fatherhood is the most important thing to him.

 

Listen to the conversation here or, for immediate access to our podcasts, subscribe to HFPA in Conversation on iTunes.