It's a wonderful thing working with young actors. I know a lot of people don't like working with children. I actually adore it, because you watch their imagination open up and you watch them start to learn this job that I've been doing for so long. They come with such a lack of cynicism.

If you look at some shows that have an ugly feel to them, or a nihilistic sort of feel to them, you'll usually find a group of cynical, unhappy, miserable people behind the production. If you see a show that's rather boring, or a cookie-cutter factory show, you'll usually find some pretty uninteresting, boring people behind it.

I did a show called 'Wonderland' a few years back, and I was fortunate enough to spend a full-on two weeks - I'm talking 13-15 hours a day - with the doctors and patients at Bellevue in New York. That served me well for 'Durham County.

That's what I think is smart about 'Durham County.' It's not derivative of anything American. It's more in the vein of the BBC miniseries I grew up with.

As an actor, you want as much variety as you can muster up. Otherwise you just keep playing the same chord over and over again.

There's a feeling of immortality you have in youth. You just don't see the dangers around you, or, if you do, maybe you're even excited by them.

At one point I had a stretch where it was working on 'In Treatment,' then 'True Blood,' then 'Durham County,' then 'True Blood,' then 'In Treatment' again. If I didn't have that little dose of 'True Blood' in the middle, I might have lost my mind.