Joe Morton

Joe Morton: Nothing ever happens the way you think it's going to happen. I left school wanting to do Shakespeare and the Greeks, and I ended up doing musicals because I could sing. It moved me very quickly. . . . But it was never anything I wanted to do. It looked like a dead-end situation unless I was going to be a recording artist or go on to do musicals.

Joe Morton: (about how his father's death affected his work) I spend a lot of time doing characters like Mike James, who go around avenging everyone else's wrongs - or characters like I play in classical theater, who are always avenging their father's deaths.

Joe Morton: (about getting to play a bad guy) No, as long as it has a point of view. If there's a reason for this guy to be a bad guy, then that's terrific. I'd love, actually, to play somebody who is really smart and really horrible [laughs].

Joe Morton: I make it a habit of never trying to judge what an audience might think, only because all points of view are too close, because we're doing it every day, I think that the actor's point of view is sometimes too close to what the material actually is. So when you get fresh eyes and bring in the audience on it, you kind of get a more fully-rounded idea of what it is that you're doing.