There are certain ways of being that people don't find acceptable or very pleasant in regular life, but you go out on stage and do pretty much the same thing and they find it spellbinding.

If you are going to be on TV for however many years, you want to make sure that you have writers that are giving you something to work with, and I got that in spades.

One thing I'm a big fan of is the theater of the absurd. That's what I come from, that's what I love to do more than anything. What I love about absurdity is the words "comedy" and "drama" get thrown out the window and it's just life, which is absurd.

When I'm working, I don't wake up and say, 'OK, time to go be intense.' I just look at whatever scenes we're working on that day and break them down - just real intense everyday work.

I want to focus on each scene. I'm a real perfectionist, and I don't want to feel like I didn't consider every possible variation of a scene. I come from a theater background, so I'm used to a lot of repetition, and I'm used to really attacking something over and over and over again.

There's nothing routine about 'Boardwalk Empire.' It's like being in some secret society where they call you up and tell you where to go: 'Meet us at the corner of such and so.'

It's obviously a lot harder to try and be a good guy than it is to be a bad guy. The world is a fundamentally evil place, it seems like. So in order to be a good person, you have to fight temptation and vice.