The beautiful thing about having grown up in Brooklyn is, because of the rich cultural and racial diversity there, no one seemed to give too much thought to where I fit on the racial spectrum. But there were times when I would run up against someone who was interested in figuring out what race was. That would come as a surprise, and in some cases, like a slap in the face.

My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.

A great book provides escapism for me. The artistry and the creativity in a story are better than any drugs.

A ghostly side note Soldier boy Miller played a Lucifer-like character in the final two episodes of Joan of Arcadia. Coincidence I do find it strangely poetic, ... that a character who shows up on a show about God to play something kind of satanic winds up in the very last two episodes of that show, and then appears in the show that replaces that show on its exact time and night the following season.

I think what you learn, working on a film or TV set, is how to tune certain things out. You've got 60-100 people swirling around you, each of them with a very important job to do.

My experience is that I find myself having to constantly define myself to others, day-in, day-out. The quote that's helped me the most through that is from Toni Morrison's "Beloved" where she says, "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined" - so I find myself defining myself for other people lest I be defined by others and stuck into some box where I don't particularly belong.

There was no script, but I said, 'I'm in, regardless' and was committed to Legends before I saw a single page.It was a lovely surprise to find so much meat on the bone.