“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.

And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.

Each of the substances of a man’s diet acts upon his body and changes it in some way and upon these changes his whole life depends.

People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.

All l mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way.

I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.

I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching and I have told it so often that I know it by heart. I do not have to embellish; it makes its own way.

I don’t believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents.