I'm a poet. I'm just a renaissance man in my heart. I can build shelves and I can write poetry.

People fight for their regulars. It gets dirty sometimes.

One thing that I've been very vocal about roles I take, and my representation has been very smart about, is that I didn't go to Juilliard to be "Thug #2" in movies. I like to be challenged. I'd say that about 40% of the roles I've done have been written for white men.

I did this movie with Spike Lee called Sucker Free City, and that would have to be my favorite role by far. It was just so much fun to work with Spike and shoot in San Francisco.

Instead of becoming an engineer like my brother, I moved to New York to be an actor.

I love what I do. If I have the opportunity to do what I do with people I admire, it's 10 times better.

Playing somebody who's real, you can bring all kind of nuances and things to him that you get from source material and things like that, but the more popular or known the person is, the more impossible it is. To get it right, that is the goal.