 Prison Break is so far-fetched, I had to make viewers believe that Michael is capable of making the impossible possible. |
| There'll be moments when I'm out in the prison yard, chatting with the cast and the crew, getting ready to shoot a scene. And then I'll remember if I were actually an inmate, I'd only be out there an hour. The other 23 hours of the day, I'd be in my cell. It's kind of a downer. |
| You have to love what you do, and you have to need it like you need air. And there's nothing else that would give me the same degree of satisfaction as acting, which is why I can't walk away from it. |
| If I were to wait only for roles that clarify my racial makeup, I'd be waiting for a very, very long time. |
| I hadn't worked for a year when I had my Prison Break audition and it was the easiest audition I've ever had. I got the script on Friday, went to the audition on Monday and got the part on Tuesday. I was shooting the pilot a week later. I didn't have time to be nervous - it happened so quickly. |
| A racial community provides not only a sense of identity, that luxury of looking into another's face and seeing yourself reflected back, but a sense of security and support. |
| L.A. has been my home for the last ten years. I've come to like it a lot. But it's very much about the entertainment industry, and it can be a little incestuous. That's what I liked most about working in Chicago - not everyone I met was somehow connected with the business. Not everyone had a stack of headshots in the backseat of their car. Not everyone was working on a script. |
| Nobody's ever asked me to pay for a meal before I've eaten it, I've never been pulled over just because I was driving the wrong kind of car in the wrong kind of area at the wrong time of night. |
| My character in 'Prison Break' needs to be formidable. In reality, I'm not very tough at all. |
| I broke my nose in gym when a ball hit me. I took a girl to her debutante ball the next week wearing a tux and a big, honking bandage. Not the romantic night she had in mind. |
| Michael Scofield is someone everyone can relate to, but nobody would want to be in his shoes. |
| There's so much we can't express in our day-to-day interaction with people because it's considered inappropriate. And acting is all about being inappropriate. |
| I've been spared to a large extent the business end of the race stick. |
| In my career as an actor, there is a catchphrase that Scofield always says often in regards to his brother, 'Have a little faith.' In my own career as an actor, there were times when I was the only one who believed in myself in the face of the odds. |
| My father is black and my mother is white. Therefore, I could answer to either, which kind of makes me a racial Lone Ranger, caught between two communities. |
| I want to aspire to something like what Denzel Washington does, which is try to find scripts written for white actors - or Jodie Foster, who reads scripts for male actors. |
| I'm neither sexy nor a star. |
| I feel extremely lucky, extremely grateful, and a little bittersweet, too. |
| I have to laugh internally when I'm asked in interviews what nightspots I like to hit. I just don't have answers... so sometimes I make them up. |
| Four months of preparation and about 12 hours of shooting turned into about 30 seconds of screen time. |
