Race prejudice has nothing to do with color. It has to do with being the stranger.

If you have the skill, then you can move as you age.

I don't know of any actor in any television show that I have ever seen who's given monologue after monologue in a television series.

Unfortunately, most actors want to play off their own personal mystique and good looks and whatever, but that will only carry you but so far.

Is it racist to prefer country music over the blues? Or is it simply a classic case of tribal antipathy toward the unfamiliar, in favor of gravitating to what you know?

'12 Years A Slave' is a film that is beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, and told in a compelling manner. However, there are some questions, in my opinion, as to its importance. Paramount among those questions is, What does this scenario illustrate that we didn't know or haven't seen before? And why does such a film garner such popularity?

What's lovely about 'Eureka' is that it's a sci-fi show, but it's not monsters from outer space; it's not craziness from outer space. It's just about this community of people and what they do. These geniuses have sometimes done wonderful things and sometimes created global warming. It has this wonderful left-of-center sense of humor.

I think theater is the strongest place to find what's missing in entertainment. Unfortunately, it pays the least.

For all of the diversity in 'Scandal,' no one else would be sitting in a room wearing a T-shirt and chains and call a Southern white Republican president a 'boy.' And it's those kinds of things that Rowan has the freedom to say that nobody else could say within the confines of the show.

I actually went to the university as a psychology major, and at orientation, they took us around the campus and took us to the theater for a skit. At the end of the skit, I literally could not get up out of my seat.

With my background, I came out of the theater.

When I started off many years ago, I made a determination that there were certain roles I didn't want to play.

I think many villains have the burden of not being very human.

I came into the industry at a time when there weren't a lot of choices to what you could do.

By the time I graduated, I was the drum major, the highest-ranking officer, and third in my class.

If you want someone who is sort of still, has a bit of an edge, is older, you get Morgan Freeman. If you want someone who can carry a gun and still play a father, you get Danny Glover. My category is 'that guy who happens to be black.'

I suppose I prefer kind of epic dramas like, oh, I don't know... 'Lawrence Of Arabia' or 'Apocalypse Now'; those are the movies that I have a tendency to be most fond of.

Proof' is going to be, in many ways, a mystery. It's not a procedural in any way. It's not a medical drama. It really is about trying to investigate whether or not there's life after death.

One, I had never worked with John Woo before and I wanted to see what that was like, and two, Ben Affleck is a friend, so it would be fun to work with him again.

In the 1980s, there was no category to stick me in. 'He sounds too smart' is what I was hearing. I realized that I had to become a member of the school of what I call 'ugly acting.' Which meant I wanted to do what Dustin Hoffman did very successfully: to play character roles, but lead character roles.

Accolades are there to congratulate you but also to make you understand that it's not over. You now have to continue trying to improve the craft and keep going. It's not something to rest on.

I think it talks about the fact that there are black people in the world who have tremendous amount of talents and have no channel through which they can those talents.

'Black film,' unless it's lucky enough or creative enough, or timely enough to build a life of its own, hangs subjacent to 'white film' on Hollywood's financial score board... aided and abetted by the supposition that so-called black film has no foreign market.

My father was in the service. His job was to integrate the Armed Forces overseas. So that meant we showed up at military bases in Okinawa or Germany, racially unannounced. That made me, in that particular society if you will, the outsider.