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" I received a phone call; my agent got a phone call from Ryan Murphy saying he wanted to talk to me... And he basically outlined 'American Horror Story' for me and said that there's a character named Larry the Burn Guy, and I'd like you to play it. "

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" Anybody who knows me has said, 'I had a Denis O'Hare moment.' I suppose in the kindest instance it means standing up for yourself. In the unkindest, it means the crazy guy in the street. "

Denis O'Hare

Moment

Crazy

" I'm a little bit of an obsessed artist, and I'm not very talented. But isn't Suzanne Somers a bad painter? "

" I went on a Buddha jag. I read 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist' by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha, which is a great book. "

" I guess I didn't even know the word 'genre' until I did 'True Blood.' That's how naive I was, and I didn't realize that there was a point of view about certain types of TV. And so I guess I found it disappointing that there is a segment of the critical community that looks at genre as something that is separate, less than. "

" Funnily enough, I was a big fan of the show and had been watching it - along with everybody else - and had never imagined that I would be on it. You kind of look at shows and think, 'Oh, I wish I had done that one.' But I didn't really see myself on 'True Blood.' "

" I've been watching 'Lost' on DVD recently. I keep thinking, 'Where are those actors now?' Nobody knows. "

" I'm 48, and I have been in love with vampires since I was six. I was born in 1962, so I've been through three or four waves of vampires. When I was growing up, we had vampire shows and movies. We were still dealing with Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and the old Christopher Lee vampires. "

" It's highly dishonorable to ever quit a production. I never have done it, and I can't imagine ever doing it. However, I have been in productions before where, on the first in the read-through, you feel that someone is in trouble, and indeed, actors have been let go shortly after read-throughs. I've seen that happen before. "

" I was a big fan of 'Six Feet Under.' So, I got a bootleg copy of the first four episodes on videotape, watched them and was instantly into it. During the first episode, I was like, 'Eh.' By the time I got to the second one, I couldn't watch them fast enough. I got on the phone that night, called Time Warner cable and ordered HBO right then. "

" Generally, it's a great exercise to not get stuck in one medium too long because you begin to lose perspective on the peculiar drawbacks and strengths of the medium. For example, if I'm in the back of the stage and I want you to see my emotional change by a flicker of my eyelid, we're all going to be in for a long boring evening. "

" Between New York and L.A., and all of us who are actors, I feel like we're just one big, cast repertory company, all running back and forth between the coasts and between different shows. There is a wealth of great character actors, who show up, here and there, on different shows. I love the fact that we're allowed to do that. "

" 'The Iliad' is about a war 1,200 years ago that solved nothing and achieved nothing. Most of our wars achieve very little. But whatever agenda I have gets buried in a work this great. If you're being honest, you realize that, as an artist, you're not a policy maker. "

" My first paying gig was a play called 'The Voice of the Prairie' at a theater that no longer exists in Chicago called Wisdom Bridge. I played a fast-talking radio huckster - a salesman of crystal sets in the 1920s - and I actually won an award. Look at that! And then promptly didn't get hired for a year. "

" I think it was 1987 - something like that - or '86, and I thought, 'When you go equity and you're gonna get paid, you'll finally be able to make a living.' But it was not to be so. I always bartended and waited tables so I ended up not doing theater for about a year because nobody would hire me. "

Denis O'Hare

Thought

Think

" There are values on Broadway that are dangerous: it's got to be Best Musical, it's got to make money, it's got to run a certain amount of time. Nowhere in this, of course, is there any mention of quality. "

" I went to Northwestern in Chicago, in Evanston, and then I ended up trickling down in Chicago theater. I did a bunch of plays, but I was non-equity. For a lot of people, non-equity means you're not yet professional. But for me, if you're in a mainstream theater, you're doing something real. "

Denis O'Hare

You

Professional

" When you think of Grimm's fairy tales, they are deeply, deeply psychological. They're so powerful, so bloody, and really, really disturbing. Think about five-year-olds reading that stuff. Even 'Little Red Riding Hood' is a really freaky story. Grandma is gobbled up by a wolf, and the wolf is going to eat the girl. That's scary stuff. "

" You have to learn to express differently. Whenever I do TV or film, I ask if I can see the shot to see, to see if it's full body or a close-up. That helps me understand how to communicate. "

" I read 'Dracula' in high school. I've been around vampires forever. "

" I think all the characters in 'American Horror Story,' which is why I love it, are looking for some sense of meaning, and also it's their form of happiness. "

" And I guess I'm a kid at heart in that when I go for entertainment, I want to be totally transported. I want to go somewhere else; I want to encounter different things, different beings, different universes. And so I love that aspect of being able to play those things in both 'True Blood' and in 'American Horror Story.' "

" Michael Winterbottom is one of the great directors of this century. "

" Comic-Con is a special kind of crazy. "

" I've been acting for a long time, and I've done a lot of things, and I've been maintaining my anonymity pretty well. I get recognized once a week, at most, here and there, so I'm reluctant to give that up. "

" I was raised on the brothers Grimm, but my favorite fairy tales in the world are Oscar Wilde's - 'The Nightingale and the Rose,' 'The Selfish Giant.' The latter is probably my all-time favorite. "

" I hate singing. I hate dancing. I enjoyed doing 'Cabaret' and 'Assassins,' but I would wither up and die in 'The Music Man.' "

" Evil is such a simplistic way to describe any character, be it Iago or Caliban, or any character from history. "

" I was a fan of 'Six Feet Under' and was very sad when it ended, so I was not ready to switch my allegiance to another show. So I was like, 'I'm not watching this 'True Blood.' Then a friend got a bootleg copy of the first four episodes, and by the third one, I was irrevocably hooked. "

" If you see me in New York, you'll probably see me on my bicycle riding furiously between a city bus and a taxi cab, hitting one of them on the side and yelling at them. "

" For all the import and message of 'The Iliad,' it's ultimately a story that's meant to be heard, and the person hearing 'The Iliad' determines what it means. "