'The Portrait of Dorian Grey' beautifully articulates how the altruistic part of ourselves clashes with our essentially narcissistic state.

Success in TV-showmaking is just a matter of being authentic and doing the best you can, and you hope that people watch it and like it. For us [showmakers], we know where our bread is buttered, and we live by the written word of the critic. That's how shows build a critical mass on cable.

I have a bit of a bucolic kind of upbringing, and so I certainly bring an amalgamation of different people that I've met over the course of my life, especially before moving to Los Angeles, so I guess my childhood was my homework in a lot of ways for Harlan County.

I find that I have no problem getting a table at a restaurant when I walk in.

It's about something that I'm extremely passionate about: exploring other cultures, how Americans are perceived by other cultures and how we perceive other cultures through our worldview. I travel whenever I get an opportunity to do so, and I think this country is ready for a show on television that is bilingual and really puts front and center another culture, both as the protagonist and the antagonist.

With a lot of the movies that I've done, they've been both dramas and comedies from Shanghai Noon to Billy Bob Thornton's second movie, Daddy and Them, to just a bunch of movies that I have done have been comic, and they're usually from a cynical kind of pessimistic point of view which is probably my sense of humor, and this is a part of myself in everybody that I play.

I do not have the angst and the anxiety of my youth. I've gotten to a place where I'm very comfortable with who I am.