I liked dark, urban stories like 'Peter Gunn,' which was a detective series on network TV when I was a little boy. I grew up in a farmtown in the Midwest where not much exciting happened. I liked the idea of lives lived at night and the shadowy characters who lived in that demi-monde.
I was a magazine illustrator for many years before I became an actor, and I used to think, 'Oh, God, all those wasted years!' But now I think it's just been one big enterprise of illustrating. I used to do it with colored pencils, and now I do it with this voice and this set of limbs.
Jack Bender is a real actor's director. Because he was an actor, and because he directed theater, he really enjoys that process.
I think of myself as a problem-solver. I want to go in and help the director and the writer to get the best they can out of the text they're working with.
I was a housepainter and a landscape nursery man, and all these various odd jobs I had, and started doing community theater.
This is this thing I harp on: Sometimes acting can be a self-defeating psychological enterprise if we feel like we're desperate, if we feel like we're beggars at the door, praying that someone will take pity on us and give us a job. It would be so much better to feel like we're tradesmen.
I like the things every actor likes - I like great, intense duet scenes with good actors.
It's not really an easier racket than acting is. For some reason, I guess it had - the rejection of an illustrator's life is less penetrating than the rejection of an actor's life. So I was able to manage that. But all the while, I still nursed that old dream of being an actor.
I was 42 when I started to make my living as an actor.
I'm very proud of my New York debut. I played Oscar Wilde in 'Gross Indecency' off Broadway in about 1997. And I was very proud of my Broadway debut in 'The Iceman Cometh.'
I'm the worst at a computer.
It worries me a little bit the reach and power of TV. More people saw me in 'The Practice' than will ever see me in all the stage plays I ever do. Which is sort of humbling. Or troubling. Or both.
'Elementary' is a strong show; we watch it almost religiously in our house.
I've played villains on stage - you know, the Iagos and so on - but I think of myself as a funny person. I mostly did comedies before I did TV work.
In a way, 'Lost,' or maybe TV in general, is a kind of a contract between the writers and the viewers. And the actors - of course we have a great deal to do with it - but where the drama's made, sort of where the meeting of minds is, is between those two parties: writers and audience.
The 'Lost' style book is really quite set. We do things like, we walk through the jungle, and we stop and turn and talk to each other. We never talk and walk. We always stop to talk.
I've been blessed by doing classic plays on Broadway, which was one of my great dreams forever.
I'd really like to play a character who's inarticulate. I always play people with language. It would be good to play a mute or a fool or a saint.
Yeah, it's funny, working on a show with as large a cast as we have here, your work gets sort of compartmentalized. There's still about half the cast that I've never had a scene with but I have missed working with Terry.
I have had some good fortune in the world of television. I have had it late in life after many youthful struggles and a change of careers.
