I think it was 1987 - something like that - or '86, and I thought, 'When you go equity and you're gonna get paid, you'll finally be able to make a living.' But it was not to be so. I always bartended and waited tables so I ended up not doing theater for about a year because nobody would hire me.

For all the import and message of 'The Iliad,' it's ultimately a story that's meant to be heard, and the person hearing 'The Iliad' determines what it means.

I guess I didn't even know the word 'genre' until I did 'True Blood.' That's how naive I was, and I didn't realize that there was a point of view about certain types of TV. And so I guess I found it disappointing that there is a segment of the critical community that looks at genre as something that is separate, less than.

We see images of people being beheaded on TV. That's not a thing that you see all the time. That's a different kind of scary. Unfortunately, some of the scary stuff is political, and that's a change from our past.

And I guess I'm a kid at heart in that when I go for entertainment, I want to be totally transported. I want to go somewhere else; I want to encounter different things, different beings, different universes. And so I love that aspect of being able to play those things in both 'True Blood' and in 'American Horror Story.'

I read five books on the Constitution. My favorite was 'Plain, Honest Men' by Richard Beeman. I went on a science jag in the same way. I kept getting in arguments about evolution and being bested. So I read Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of the Species,' a fantastic book that is not that difficult.

Especially when it comes to something like the awards, I find it kind of baffling that 'True Blood' has been snubbed so many times given the incredible range of acting they have on there; I mean, incredible storytelling and the incredible production values.