What firefighters, and people in our military and cops do is separate from what the rest of us do, basically these people say "I'm going to protect all these strangers."

I'm the enemy. Because I like to think, I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech, the freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy who likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder - "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of BBQ ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I want high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and buskets of cheese, okay? I wanna smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jell-O all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal?

The second season is generally easier do because you know the actors better and they know the characters better and if everybody likes each other you can really go all types of places.

I wanted to get more serialized. I had this idea for an event that would click onto everybody's mortality. I said, "I want somebody to die." Fortunately for me, when I was toying with that idea, John Landgraf, who's the head of FX but also a very smart executive, came up with the idea of the ashes in the maracas. He called me up and said, "Listen, what about this, they get the ashes in a box and when they get them, they shake them and they sound like maracas." And I was like, "Okay, now I've got my throughline."

In my experience in series TV if you have a good crew and a great cast it's going to be a great group - similar to the theater where it's a bunch of people who are really talented and go to work each day and challenge each other and if you are lucky enough to get a hit then it's five or six or seven years of this kind of work.

I don't really have a lot of fun playing just straight good guys. It's not my thing. It's like Tom Hanks territory.

There's no male Oprah.