Michael Emerson

“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.”

“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.”

“Anything that has to do with air travel and air tragedy is of interest to me.”

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

“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.'”

“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 like shooting on location in New York City.”

“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'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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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 truly glad there are so many options on television that are for grown and thinking people.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“'Elementary' is a strong show; we watch it almost religiously in our house.”