I started acting, almost on a whim to help my music career.

I mean, you know actors, we always want to do something else, something different.

I can only speak as an American, but most journalism here isn't doing its job any more. It's about selling stuff.

You either get better, or you don't progress.

'The Wire' really drew on a lot of real-life situations and real-life organizations - it created fiction to make a social statement about reality.

Most of the characters I'd played were so different from me, so far from me that I had to transform.

Notes are tricky in an audition, because I find, more often than not, my instinct is right. If they have a preconceived notion about the role and it goes against my instinct, unless it makes sense to me, it often throws off what I'm trying to do. Though sometimes they have an insight that I don't because they've been living with the script. I don't have one feeling or another about notes, but it is always a little bit of a red alert when I get one in an audition.