THE PRETTY SPEAKS

On His Racial Identity
On His Profession
On His Acting Roles
On Himself
Random Musings

On His Racial Identity

"I'm not white."

"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."

"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."

"As far as being black versus African-American, I have a problem with hyphenates. I don't want to be African-American or Chinese-American or Irish-American. My family's been in this country for generations. There is no reason in the world
why I can't lay claim to just American."

"My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that
they wouldn't make at my family reunion."

"I just had a conversation with a reporter in New York and he told me, 'So you're a mutt.' And I told him, 'You know, I find the term "mutt" deeply offensive.' So he started back-pedaling and said, 'I'm a mutt, too. I'm part German and part Irish.' 'That means you're white,' I told him.
'But thank you for playing!'"

"It leaves a cut. Someone calls you nigger, and it's like a knife to the gut. You suffer enough nicks and you bleed to death just the same. So when that happens, you're confronted with the quandary: do I stop the party, do I grind things to a halt? And ideally you would each and every single time, but I have better things to do than to educate people."

On His Profession

"I never want to be a celebrity. There's a quote I heard the other day that 'Celebrity is fame divorced from accomplishment.' Once your personality becomes larger than any performance that you can give, you have painted yourself into a corner."

"The attention has been a little strange, but fortunately there's a healthy disconnect between myself and the person who looks like me staring up from
magazines and newspaper clippings."

"I’m one of those actors who’s going to have to create a space for themselves. It’s very easy to be the young Tom Cruise, because Hollywood knows what to do with you. But if you’re someone who’s bringing someone slightly left of center to the table, you’re not a sure thing."

"Working hard [in the entertainment industry] is no guarantee of success. There is a ladder, but moving up from one step to the next is not guaranteed. There are many very driven, talented people who, despite their best efforts, will not make it."

"... I value the experience I did have behind that desk because to make it in this business, you need the soul of an artist but the pulse of a bureaucrat. If you're waiting tables, waiting for your break, and you're not willing to come home every night after a long shift at the restaurant and stuff your head-shots and resumes into envelopes to send out to agents and managers, you're not going to make it. It's not going to happen for you."

"They told me at the end of that [screen] test that they wanted me to be a part of this project... I had a moment of clarity where I thought to myself that not many people will ever have this moment... Extraordinarily talented people, more talented than me by far, for whatever reason will not have this feeling that I'm feeling right now. I feel extremely lucky, extremely grateful,
and a little bittersweet, too."

"It was never about the money. Because acting for me, at its best, you're working on a project that touches you in some way. And that allows you to touch a bunch of strangers, whether they're sitting there with you -- you're doing a play -- or they're in an audience watching you on the screen. There's a kind of thrill that comes along with that that I have not been able to find anywhere else. So even if I had to go back to temping, even if this is not the beginning of an amazing career, I would not regret making that jump."

"I had an acting coach once who said a very valuable piece of advice, putting together a film or TV show is very much like Thanksgiving dinner. A lot of people have worked very hard to put that food on the table. And if you waltz out of your trailer without so much as a thank you, you’re really no better than a stranger who comes in off the street and sits down to eat. You don’t deserve to be at that table. So it’s your job to respect everyone else’s contributions, and be prepared to take [what you do] to the next level."

"I try to stay as far away from the excessive parts of the business as possible. I don't go out to the bars and clubs. I'm not trolling the fansites.... I remember going on one site, reading something about my performance and it wasn't flattering. I took it to heart — like it was my acting coach who had given me some criticism — until I realized, this could be some 11-year-old in his mom's basement who didn't get his juice box that morning and he's taking the abuse out on me. "

"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."

"There has to be a measure of faith. That's what this business is all about: trusting in something that may never show up, that you have no concrete proof of."

On His Acting Roles

"I liked the [Human Stain] script a lot because it resonated with me as a minority. I thought I knew a lot of the subtext of what was going on with this character."

"It sounds weird, but they asked for proof that I was what I said I was, because an actor will say just about anything to get a role. So I literally had to go to Kinko's with the family photo album and copy the photos of the ancestors, from the great-grandparents on down. And I'm standing there at the Xerox machine looking at all these faces, and thinking about what my family has been through. And I thought, God – has all this been for me to book this role [as Coleman Silk]? And the answer was no, but also yes, in a strange way. It felt like just the right time and the right role and the right place.

"We occupy in a way an ideological null zone. It's where, I think, my character in [Human Stain] finds himself where at the end of his life; his black friends have deserted him and his white friends snub him on the street. It's a strange place to be and I like to think that the picture is about this man who is put into a box, is suffocating, and wants to break free but maybe has forgotten how. I think that everyone's been there based on gender, religion, personal politics – we all know what it's like to be stifled and need to be free, racial issues aside."

"I worked with the same trainer that worked with Denzel Washington in The Hurricane. It was three months of training, five days a week, 4 to 5 hours a day. This was followed by a month of choreography. So, four months of preparation and about 12 hours of shooting turned into about 30 seconds of screen time."

"We did the [Human Stain] kissing scene in as many takes as possible!
We had the luxury of rehearsing for two weeks."

On what attracted him to the role of Michael Scofield: "It was kinda the paycheck to be
perfectly honest with you. I hadn't worked in a long time..."

"[Joliet Prison's] got a stark beauty to it: the yellow brick of the walls, the green of the prison yard, the blue sky overhead. It has its moments of haunting beauty, but then when I'm sitting in the prison yard hanging out with the cast and crew getting ready to shoot a scene and enjoying myself, suddenly I'll remember that if I were an inmate at that facility, I'd only be outside one hour a day. The main surprise is how sad the place still is. It's got 150 years of pain and fear and violence soaked into those walls."

"All [Michael Scofield] has is his wits. He's not a superhero. He doesn't have any Jackie Chan martial-arts moves, ... And every episode, his planning and preparation and cleverness run smack into the wall of fate, chance, accident, human nature – things you can't predict or prepare for."

"[S]tructural engineering is the art and science of connectivity. The pieces of a building are all interdependent. My brother in [Prison Break] is behind the wall and every brick in that wall represents the conspiracy that put him there. My job as his brother and as an engineer is to find that one brick and loosen it. And another and another and hopefully
the whole thing will come down."

"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 tell my reps to send me any parts where race doesn't matter – that's closer to equality in the long run.
I hope we get there some day."

On Himself

"I'm just a dork."

"I'm pretty much a couch potato."

"I’m just thinking about lunch."

"I go to the library, I do a lot of reading, I eat at Subway.
When I need some boxers I go to the Gap."

"I don't feel any particular pressure to be the cute one. That's Dominic's territory."

"Wentworth Miller: Meat Puppet"

On His hair: "Mine grows pretty quickly, like a Chia Pet."

Biggest vice: "Cookies. I can polish off a bag of Double Stuf Oreos in about
20 minutes, but not without milk."

Biggest act of heroism: "I can't walk past a woman struggling with her grocery bags.
I have to stop and ask if she needs help."

Favorite restaurant: "Any place that serves margaritas, chips and guacamole."

Favorite landmark: "Prospect Park in Brooklyn. I grew up down the block,
and that was the center of my childhood."

On possible nude scenes: "It has to make sense for the movie, it's got to be well lit,
and Grandma has to agree not to see it."

On what He smells like: "Chocolate chip cookies.
I've got a sweet tooth like nobody's business."

Random Musings

To His fans: "Be Good."

"I have always been fascinated by the ways in which we can only see ourselves
through the eyes of other people."

On His ideal girlfriend: "My rule is you want someone who's got both feet on the ground. An ideal girlfriend might be someone who works in the business and can understand what you're going through but is not an actor themselves – is willing to run lines with you, but when you start acting crazy, they throw up their hands and take you for
what you are and are accepting."

On His Undergraduate Thesis: "I wrote on the idea of doubling and the gender identity construct in Jane Eyre and The Wide Sargasso Sea – which is about identifying yourself; perceiving yourself through the eyes of the dominant white male hierarchy."

On His controversial Daily Princetonian cartoon: "Instead of stepping forward and explaining what I’d meant by the cartoon and positing my own racial background as evidence that I’d really meant no harm, I chose to remain silent. My attitude was, If they don’t get it, I don’t have to explain it, which was my way of saying that if they don’t get me, I don’t have to explain me. The people who knew me on campus and knew my background knew where I was coming from, but I think for most people I was just a name in the paper, and they probably assumed I was white."