As a teen, I had no idea what the self was. Changing skin like a chameleon came naturally to me, but the self felt like a plastic chair in an airport where I'd have to sit and wait for the next radical character to define who I'd be that season. Acting grabbed me by the gut.
If you're working on better conditions for prisoners, if you make that a popular issue and you invite mainstream media to weigh in on that subject, you're going to end up with a much more regressive public-policy environment than if you approach it in a quieter way. It's not because the public is stupid, it's just that people with only a cursory interest in something are going to have a knee-jerk reaction to it. That's impossible to explain in a cable-news media. . . it doesn't make sense.