Interview for The Times

The Times recently released an interview with Patrick Dempsey.

In a new interview for The Times, Patrick Dempsey discusses his love for racing and watches, working on Ferrari, how he learned to drive and more.

He describes working on Ferrari as his “dream role experience”.

When asked if acting makes him a good driver he says: “When I’m acting, I can tell you who’s in the room. I know if someone’s dropped something off camera. I’m aware of it all. It really helps your situational awareness, because you can use all that in front of the camera. And you need to have all that when you’re driving, because you need to know where that competitor is, who you’re chasing, what position you’re in.”

He explains that one of the things he loves about racing is “the Zen aspect of it, it’s the relaxed nature of it. The more relaxed you are, the faster you are. I think it’s being present. It is hard to be present any more, because there are so many distractions — your phone’s always going off. And in the car, you are in the moment in the fullest sense. Your situational awareness is really at a higher level. Your consciousness and awareness are at a peak level.”

Later on in the interview he recalls learning to drive: “I had to learn how to drive because I lived in a rural community. If you wanted to go anywhere, you had to be on a bike or you had to walk or hitchhike. So I started driving, probably about 12 or 13, in the field. My father would let me do the dump runs. The road must have been a mile and it was dirt, so you could drift it all the way down to the dump.”

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