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.

Maybe when you're alone or no one's looking, you dare to think, "Maybe someday I could get to work with somebody like Quentin Tarantino." For me, it happened. And it didn't just happen once, it's happened twice.

Art is not created in a vacuum. That experience is something to be shared with a group of people, and to be moved in that way.

An actor that tells you that they have real choices between material is, for the most part, lying. There are very few people that have opportunities. But what you do have where I am in my career, is saying no to the things that seem repetitious. For me, I always look for material that allows me to bring my worldview to it. And those opportunities, since the beginning of The Shield, have grown exponentially.

Whenever you show up on a set where you haven't been from the beginning - at least myself - I'm kind of quiet. I just watch the politics and how everything unfolds. It's kind of like going to a new high school. You want to see who everyone is before you introduce yourself, really, to kind of make friends. I think any smart person does that in social situations

I wrote about wasting time, which I suppose is a part of the great human journey. We're supposed to wallow, to go through the desert without water for a long time so that when we finally drink it, we'll truly need it and we won't spill a drop. It's about being present.