Michael Emerson

I was 42 when I started to make my living as an actor.

I've been blessed by doing classic plays on Broadway, which was one of my great dreams forever.

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.

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'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.

I'm truly glad there are so many options on television that are for grown and thinking people.

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 was a housepainter and a landscape nursery man, and all these various odd jobs I had, and started doing community theater.

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.

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.

I'm terrible with tech. But I'm good with jargon. I can sound like I know what I'm doing.

Jack Bender is a real actor's director. Because he was an actor, and because he directed theater, he really enjoys that process.