Michael Emerson
I was a magazine illustrator for many years before I became an actor, and I used to think, 'Oh, God, all those wasted years!' But now I think it's just been one big enterprise of illustrating. I used to do it with colored pencils, and now I do it with this voice and this set of limbs.
I'm terrible with tech. But I'm good with jargon. I can sound like I know what I'm doing.
'Elementary' is a strong show; we watch it almost religiously in our house.
Yeah, it's funny, working on a show with as large a cast as we have here, your work gets sort of compartmentalized. There's still about half the cast that I've never had a scene with but I have missed working with Terry.
I've played villains on stage - you know, the Iagos and so on - but I think of myself as a funny person. I mostly did comedies before I did TV work.
It worries me a little bit the reach and power of TV. More people saw me in 'The Practice' than will ever see me in all the stage plays I ever do. Which is sort of humbling. Or troubling. Or both.
I've been blessed by doing classic plays on Broadway, which was one of my great dreams forever.
I think of myself as a problem-solver. I want to go in and help the director and the writer to get the best they can out of the text they're working with.
There are roles that are terrifying because they're large or you may feel that they're out of your line, but I'm never terrified once the actual work begins. Once you begin rehearsal, then it's small building blocks. It's solving little problems one at a time.
One of the things I like about performing on the stage is that it is a kind of meditative experience. Time does stand still. You have no concept or feeling of the passing of two or three hours' time. It's all kind of one present moment, which is a kind of a description of meditation.
One of the first roles I every played, I was Grandpa Vanderhoff in 'You Can't Take It With You.' Walked with a cane, white stuff in my hair. It must have been horrible. Thank God there's no videotape of it.
I had started out my grown-up life in New York City, but I couldn't figure out how to be an actor there. And so I had been a magazine illustrator instead.
The 'Lost' style book is really quite set. We do things like, we walk through the jungle, and we stop and turn and talk to each other. We never talk and walk. We always stop to talk.
Jack Bender is a real actor's director. Because he was an actor, and because he directed theater, he really enjoys that process.
Anything that has to do with air travel and air tragedy is of interest to me.
In a way, 'Lost,' or maybe TV in general, is a kind of a contract between the writers and the viewers. And the actors - of course we have a great deal to do with it - but where the drama's made, sort of where the meeting of minds is, is between those two parties: writers and audience.
I have had some good fortune in the world of television. I have had it late in life after many youthful struggles and a change of careers.
I'm truly glad there are so many options on television that are for grown and thinking people.
I'd really like to play a character who's inarticulate. I always play people with language. It would be good to play a mute or a fool or a saint.
I liked dark, urban stories like 'Peter Gunn,' which was a detective series on network TV when I was a little boy. I grew up in a farmtown in the Midwest where not much exciting happened. I liked the idea of lives lived at night and the shadowy characters who lived in that demi-monde.
I'm very proud of my New York debut. I played Oscar Wilde in 'Gross Indecency' off Broadway in about 1997. And I was very proud of my Broadway debut in 'The Iceman Cometh.'
I used to make training films for the U.S. government. I was always cast as a madman or a prisoner. I once played a prisoner who was holding himself hostage with a razor blade.
This is this thing I harp on: Sometimes acting can be a self-defeating psychological enterprise if we feel like we're desperate, if we feel like we're beggars at the door, praying that someone will take pity on us and give us a job. It would be so much better to feel like we're tradesmen.
I was 42 when I started to make my living as an actor.
There were times when I thought I had to be completely off-book and ready to give my opening night performance at the audition, but then I swung back to a more relaxed view of it. Certainly you've looked at the material and prepared it, but there's no reason to be off-book. You're not getting points for being off-book.
As an actor, I'm not sure what I had to offer the world of tragedy and comedy when I was 21. I hadn't lived a whole lot. By my middle 30s, you know, I had been knocked around a little bit.
I was a housepainter and a landscape nursery man, and all these various odd jobs I had, and started doing community theater.
I like shooting on location in New York City.
I like the things every actor likes - I like great, intense duet scenes with good actors.
I'm the worst at a computer.
It's not really an easier racket than acting is. For some reason, I guess it had - the rejection of an illustrator's life is less penetrating than the rejection of an actor's life. So I was able to manage that. But all the while, I still nursed that old dream of being an actor.
I've never landed in a series that I could have dreamt in my life. That's why, when people say, 'Well what are roles you're dying to play?' I say, I don't even have such a list, because everything that's ever been great that I had a shot at came completely out of the blue. I could not have predicted it.
I think people respond to villains because people in general are more villainous than heroic.Collection: Thinking
In your actor's heart, you know when you're playing well. Others may not always agree with you, but I'm always aware of when the scene is cooking or not. You have an instinct about that from years of doing scenes and plays, and I think it stands you in good stead even in the TV world.Collection: Heart
My mother always told me growing up I had a punchable face. Little did I know she was predicting my television career.Collection: Mother
I ask the clergy why don't I see myself represented in leadership? And I'm told, and this happens quite a bit, "We don't think about race when we hire. We just hire the best person for the job."Collection: Jobs
Maybe there's even anger. But if they make it through that they come to a new agreement, and they start creating a new culture, and it becomes something that people just - a lot of times they'll say, "I couldn't live without it. I just have to be there."Collection: Agreement
To a large extent, people's interest in the character is the mystery of the character.Collection: Character
Now they had to sit in separate places and sometimes they'd even have to sit outside and look through the windows. But they did worship together.Collection: Together
Every pastor I talk to says, and particularly if they're African American they'll say, "I'm not black enough for African Americans. I'm not white enough for the whites. I'm not Hispanic enough."Collection: White
So these are the kind of things that now when people are trying to move towards multiracial congregations that they're stressing. They're talking about these scriptures that say we ought to come together, and that at Pentecost, when that the Holy Spirit is said to have come upon the first Christians, they were given the ability to speak in different languages, and so that no matter who the people were, they could all worship together.Collection: Christian
I really do think that every time you play a role well, you are in danger of being identified with that role until the next big thing comes along.Collection: Thinking
And again, this connection that you get: I meet Joe at church. Joe's connected to a whole network of people I don't know. Joe likes me. He invites me over to his son's birthday party, and I meet his whole family. I meet his friends. I get to know his neighborhood. That happens all the time.Collection: Party
There's always that sense of because we're so racially defined, if you're trying to cross the boundaries you don't fit into any particular space.Collection: Space
We've done a lot of studies to see when they do happen, why, and I mean there's a variety of reasons. But one, it starts with a commitment where they decide this is going to be who we are. Maybe it's out of their faith, a new way of looking at their faith, that we must be integrated across race.Collection: Mean
They could never go back to being a uniracial congregation again. It brings excitement. It brings life. It allows them to be able to know people they would never know, to meet people that are outside the congregation they would have never connected with, you know, through the networks that they developed in the congregation.Collection: People
We go where our family goes. We go where our friends are, and because our social networks are so segregated by race, we end up with what we have. We also find that, you know, if you're immigrants, you're not part of that history.Collection: Race
We just say there are five, you know, racial groups in the US. I say that these folks are what we call a sixth American. There's something different. They are somebody who - they don't exist in any particular racial category, so they all feel it and they kind of congregate to each other.Collection: Groups
In part because they had no choice, right? If you were a slave, you did what the master said. And they said to worship: "You're going to worship with us."Collection: Worship You
Downsides, yeah, and when there are more downsides when churches first start - they go through stages of transforming to becoming multiracial. So in the beginning stages there's often a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, a lot of people leave.Collection: Pain