“I love when a director shows up with a lot of energy, and different ideas about how to change things and do it a different way. Once you get into series, sometimes you don’t have that, so I certainly don’t take that for granted when I get it.”

When I sat down with the creators of the show [Longmire], back when we were first starting to do the pilot, Branch was not that interesting on the page. What really sold me on the show and the character was their vision for him. It took the whole first season to flesh him out.

Once a Cubs fan, always a Cubs fan.

I definitely have an eye on doing more work in features and playing different characters, but I am also a big fan of going on vacation and playing golf and going to the beach. With anything, it’s about finding the balance.

I was growing up with a single mom who’d be at work when I came home from school. So I’d just turn on the TV. I grew up watching old Clint Eastwood westerns. I adopted him as one of my male role models.

It was a great time to grow up in Chicago. It was the mid-80s, and we had the 85 Bears and the Michael Jordan era.

Where I grew up, acting wasn’t really accessible. I was just playing sports. But, I did watch a lot of TV. I watched a lot of Clint Eastwood movies on TV and had this fantasy of being like him when I grew up.

I just really enjoy the ritual of going to work and playing, which is essentially what we do. We play pretend. Acting is a kids’ game.

I was a psychology major. I think that definitely helps in general life; I enjoy trying to figure out why people are the way they are.

George Clooney had the web of celebrity from television and doing ‘ER,’ and he’s able to parlay that into films. God willing, I’ll be up there in a few years.

I am pretty diligent with my fitness routine. I am not like a crazy workout-holic, but I stay active.

Everybody has their own approach. I don’t adhere to any one philosophy. I learn a lot from life and people – watching and other people watching.

I make a joke that I’m the Internet curmudgeon, but ‘wary’ is a good way to put it.

Live in such a way that unless God shows up what you’re attempting to do is bound to fail. This is the nature of the Gospel.

I get embarrassed listening to my last CDs. I’ve got a lot of work to do, let’s put it that way.

This search for perfection – which is a search for divinity – is nothing more than the failure to accept our existence the way it is.

The way the elderly are treated, and in some cases warehoused and medicated, rather than nurtured and listened to, is distressing.

Hunger is almost like something the West does. It’s almost like the direct result of the way the West performs.

You don’t have to be any more talented, any richer, any slimmer, any smarter, any more or less of anything to partner with God. All you have to be is willing to be used by him in everyday way

We have to get our states to adopt what are called “renewable portfolio standards” pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.