“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.”

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.

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 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.

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 think age is terribly overrated. You’re okay as long as you don’t grow up. By all means grow old, but don’t mature. Remain childlike, retain wonder, the ability to be flabbergasted by something.

Our nation’s infrastructure needs are tremendous, and they’re growing.

I was always an Alabama fan growing up, but when the Alabama recruiter told me I would probably not be able to play until the end of my sophomore year, or the beginning of my junior year.

Growing up as a black kid with a white father who loves you, who affirms you, who was part of your life is fundamentally different than what black people in my family were subjected to in the 19th century or the 18th century. But unfortunately, it doesn’t change the old racial order.

I was supposedly living this glamorous life, but I was crippled by the idea of growing old and where do I go next? The whole age thing—in our industry, it’s everything.

I certainly and deliberately introduced a great deal of variety into the people in the clamshell, which I suppose grows out of growing up in an individualistic society we profess to have.

We’re supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right?

Or we can keep moving forward with President Obama’s vision for a growing economy that works for middle-class families in North Carolina and all across the country. For me, for North Carolina and for America, it’s an easy choice.