Biography

He quit drinking alcohol after being arrested for drunk driving in March 2008.

In a 2005 interview, he claimed that The Punisher (2004) was both the most fun and the most physically exhausting movie he has done.

The son of Michael and Cynthia (née Jane) Elliott, the actor adopted his mother's maiden name, claiming to "like having a woman's first name as a last name".

Co-wrote his own comic book miniseries, Bad Planet.

Always signs autographs.

In an Indian film that I did when I was 17 years old, and that's how I got into acting. I was living in Maryland, and some Indians came to Washington DC looking for a blonde kid to appear in an Indian film. It was like a Romeo and Juliet love story between a white American and an Indian girl. They wanted me to stay in India and I did another film over there, they gave me an apartment, a car and I was an Indian movie star at 17. But then I decided to return to America, studied acting, did a lot of theatre.

"You gotta start somewhere. Whether it's indie film or whatever. Anything's a start, wherever it happens to fall. But, you can't just come out of nowhere and jump into an $80 million film, I don't think you'll ever see that happen. But I've always wanted to do a picture like this." - On his indie career start and Deep Blue Sea (1999).

I think that leading man status opens up a number of doors for you and allows you the opportunity to do a number of different kinds of roles, so I don't see myself leaving behind character work just because I can headline movies. But it's certainly more interesting to be where I'm at in my life now, to be a more integral part of the process of creating a film and taking less of a backseat and more of a front seat driver opportunity is interesting to me now.

"I try to work with people who are better than me. I for a long time considered myself a journeyman actor where I was learning my skills and honing my craft and waiting for the opportunity for something like this (The Punisher (2004)) to come along. I'm not good at vocalizing what my exact approach is, but I believe in using whatever works and making a sort of amalgamation of a number of different styles or methods to get the job done. I think that's what a lot of film acting is about. It's sort of a mongrel like approach these days. We use a number of different theories or beliefs to get you where you need to go. It's a personal experience. I don't believe in one particular system or method or another." - On his approach to acting.

"It was about six months of brutal training, twice a day at the gym, a Navy Seal guy would come over to my house and take me to the firing range, firing live rounds down the range, primary and secondary weapons. Learning edge weapons training, one man military incursions, hand to hand combat, Filipino martial arts as well as Israeli martial arts. It was brutal." - On his physical training for The Punisher (2004).