The Rich Roll Podcast - Titus Welliver On Gratitude & Great Art

Episode Date: July 29, 2019

Hey it's that guy. You know the guy, right? The guy with the crazy moustache in that Ben Affleck movie? The Man In Black from Lost? The Irish gangster in Sons of Anarchy? Oh, right. THAT GUY. Titus Welliver has one of the longest lists of working actor credits in Hollywood. Nonetheless, this über-talented veteran of stage and screen spent most of his storied career slightly outside Tinsletown's white hot spotlight. But that changed with the 2014 premier of Amazon's Original Series Bosch. A hardboiled noir crime procedural based on a series of Michael Connelly novels, the show caught fire and is currently in production on its sixth season. Suffice it to say, Titus' heavily lauded portrayal of  L.A.P.D. detective Harry Bosch landed him center on the zeitgeist stage. But this man is much more than an amazing actor finally enjoying his moment. He is a friend. And a true artist. Raised by a fashion illustrator mom and celebrated landscape painter Neil Welliver, Titus spent his formative years surrounded by a community of influential poets, writers, photographers and fine artists. Initially a painter himself, his father taught young Titus early and often that creative mastery required discipline. Patience. And a work ethic as rugged as New England winters. Perhaps an artist’s life was pre-destined for Titus. But his early passion for painting would eventually be displaced by a love of theater. It's a career that would eventually put him on a trajectory to work alongside some of the most brilliant minds in storytelling. People like David Milch, the creator of NYPD Blue, Deadwood and John From Cincinatti, who would become a father figure to Titus. Steven Bochco, producer of Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law. And Ben Affleck, who has cast Titus in all of his movies: Gone Baby Gone, The Town and Argo. In fact, it's been said that Titus has appeared in literally everything. This is a conversation about what it means to live a creative life. What is required to succeed an artist. And what it's like to devote your life to mastering a craft. We talk about how personal loss and fatherhood informs his process. Why gratitude and humility attract opportunity. And the importance of self-confidence, belief and personal drive in the artistic success equation. While art is subjective, not all art warrants merit. Bad art exists. And there is indeed an objective truth to good art. Titus is dedicated to this ethos. Today he shares his story. The visually inclined can watch our entire conversation on YouTube here: bit.ly/TitusWelliver457 (please subscribe!) I love this man. And it's a privilege to share his wisdom and experience with you today. I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange. Peace + Plants, Rich

I just feel that gratitude and humility attract opportunity and success. And the important thing is that once you obtain those things, that you also have a healthy respect of them, but put them in a place where they belong. Because I have seen people who have achieved tremendous success, and they bear no resemblance to the person that I knew prior to that success. And I find that heartbreaking when I see an actor or, you know, air quote here, celebrity being rude or acting entitled. It infuriates me, particularly when they're not talented. Because then I want to say, you're just lucky. I always say, do this because you love it, because you have to do it. Because if it's not the thing that you're thinking about, dreaming about,

when you wake up, then do something else. Find that thing that becomes your life force, that becomes your drive. That's Titus Welliver, this week on The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hello and welcome. I'm Rich Roll. This is my podcast. Good to be with you here today. Today, my guest is that guy. You know that guy, right? He's the guy, the guy with the crazy mustache in the Ben Affleck movie. You know, the man in black from Lost. Yeah, him, the Irish gangster dude in Sons of Anarchy. You know who I'm talking about, right?

The guy, the guy with the face. Actually, none of that is truly fair because Titus Welliver, veteran of stage and screen with one of the longest lists of working actor credits in Hollywood, is now pretty much inescapable due to his amazing, heavily lauded portrayal of Harry Bosch in the Amazon original series, Bosch. Titus is a great dude. He's an amazing actor, yes, but at the end of the day, very much a true artist. More all about Titus in a minute, but first. in a minute, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the

many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs.

They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do.

And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety.

And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders,

including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you.

Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. All right, my man Titus. So even if you've never seen Bosch and have no idea what I'm talking about, even if you go to the movies once in a while or watch TV occasionally, chances are you've been privy to this man's talents. What are his credits? Well, let's take a look at the long list.

JFK, The Doors, The X-Files, NYPD Blue, Deadwood, all of Ben Affleck's movies, Gone Baby Gone, The Town, Argo, and so many more. Titus is a guy who was raised by artists. His father was famous landscape painter, Neil Welliver. And Titus himself is an accomplished painter. He grew up in Philly and New York City, surrounded by a community of creatives, poets, writers, photographers, creatives, poets, writers, photographers, painters. So this is very much a conversation rooted in what it means to be an artist, to devote your life to mastering a craft and what he's learned from his dad and from working with some of the most brilliant creative minds in storytelling like David Milch, Stephen Bochco, Michael Connelly, and Ben Affleck. So all told, this is about what it means to live a creative life.

I love this guy. We've been friends for a long time. Delighted to finally have him on the show. So without further ado, this is me and Titus Welliver. Good to see you, my friend. Thank you for driving all the way out here. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. I want to do this for a long time.

We've known each other for many years. For some reason, I thought it was seven or eight, but we were talking before the podcast. I guess it's been like 10 years. Not that we're hanging out all the time, but you pop in from time to time. Well, we have a lot of mutual friends and mutual, you know, we're both on this planet, so. That's right. We are on the spinning blue

globe together. We're all in it together, man. We are. We are. And it's just been so cool to see, you know, this evolution of your career. I mean, you know, my Lord, like, you know, not that you weren't working constantly before Bosch because you have the longest IMDB in like the history of acting. But, you know, Bosch has really foisted you into, you know, the mainstream as this leading man in like such a prominent way.

I mean, I can't go anywhere without seeing a massive billboard of your face. They do. It's crazy. They do their job. That's probably unsettling for a lot of people too. Certainly my enemies would find it unsettling. Or your kids. Yeah, my kids. Everywhere I go, my dad is staring down at me. Yeah, they don't. And I make a conscious effort when the show, because the billboards typically

come out a couple of weeks before the show comes on and they you know every major city they're on the sides of buildings and here in hollywood so i make a conscious effort of avoiding areas where those because god forbid i'd be away from time square yeah i don't want to be seen within proximity of one of my billboards because i know somebody will drive by and go like what a what a self-serving as if it was your idea your idea. Yeah. You know what I mean? But the good thing is that you can't go in and out of LAX without seeing the big billboards. They really do their job of publicizing, getting the word out there about the show. So in that way, I'm eternally, eternally grateful for that. Well, you must have good relationships with cops these days.

Yeah. You know, customs agents. Like anybody who's, you know, in sort of some form of law enforcement. Yeah. You get a pass. Have you been pulled over and let out of a ticket? No. Fortunately, I haven't.

And the one thing I do have is quite often is the cops will roll up on me in their patrol cars when I'm driving and say hello. Give a nod. You know, the nice thing about that, I mean, I've always kind of, I've played a lot of cops in my career from different cities and places. Yeah. And growing up had friends who became cops, and I've always kind of had that connection to law enforcement. And they're very supportive of the show.

And I think long before we ever did the show, the books were extremely successful. And I think part of what speaks to that is the fact that, particularly with the show, it's very grounded in reality. I don't drive a Porsche. And I'm not like James Bond jumping in and out of bed with all these, with different women and things. He got a cool house though. He's got a cool house. He has the very cool house. And of course, that's sort of the great

metaphor of being kind of the Eagle's nest for a guy who is surveying the city and all that's good and bad in it. But cops like it because it's no nonsense. And I've even said to cops, God, this is what you do for a living. So I can't imagine that after a day of being a robbery homicide detective, seeing the worst of the worst in the world, that you want to go home and crack a beer and a bag of chips and put your feet up and watch a procedural law drama. But the thing is that our show really, it's not like Law & Order. It doesn't have the thing where Bosch kind of catches the case at the beginning,

works the case through the middle of the show, and then gets the bad guy by the end. I mean, we have 10 episodes. There are novels. Yeah. And so it's just the the structure of the show the narrative is much more like reading a novel you know each episode um really serves more as a purpose of of being like a chapter in a book you know and we all ingest

literature at at different paces and in the same way i think now with this whole binge watching notion see as little or as much as you want and there are certain things that i'll watch at different paces. And in the same way, I think now with this whole binge-watching notion, see as little or as much as you want. And there are certain things that I'll watch where as much as I want to get through it because it's so good, I really try to kind of savor sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Stranger Things was, for me, was so difficult because it was so engaging that I couldn't pull away from it.

Right, you want to just rip through it. Want to go through it. But then, you know, if I would do more than two episodes, I was, you know, I was like a bad kid that ate too much cake. Right. And I'd feel kind of shamed, which, of course, you know, speaks to many, many different. Well, I feel, I like that immersive experience, you know, and I really prefer the kind of shows that unfurl themselves slowly and take their time. And I will go so far as to, for shows that aren't all online at the same time where they, you know, eke them out week

by week, I'll wait until the season's over and then start it because I don't want to wait a week and then forget what happened and have to reboot myself to get into it again so it is like reading a book yeah no i do i i absolutely do that the same way if it's a there's certain network shows that my daughter and i you know will watch together and that's sort of the you know and then you can it can come on then you can watch it on demand when you want to but anything that's on amazon or netflix or hulu um that's that that doesn't come out drop all at once i'll wait i'll just wait because i want to be able to have that choice right which is i mean you know it's we live in the society of serious attention deficit and impatience, but that's okay.

Right. Well, the unanimous consensus is that never has there been a character that fit an actor more like a glove than Hieronymus Bosch with you. Even so far as Stephen King publicly saying it on Twitter. as Stephen King publicly saying it on Twitter. I mean, this is like everybody sees you so closely identified with this character from these many books that Michael Connelly wrote. I mean, how do you approach that? Like, how did you figure out how to inhabit that person

with that level of authenticity? Well, there's always the sort of background, you know, research cop stuff, how to get in and out of the car and weapons handling. Did you spend a ton of time? I mean, over your career, you've probably spent a ton of time. I've played enough cops that that part of it was kind of there. But the thing that hooked me into this character was the humanity of him. I mean, you know, he's an antihero. You know, he's an anti-hero. He's a quintessential anti-hero. He's flawed.

There's a profound kind of sadness to the character. There are definitely certain similarities in that way that made that character that I responded to him because I saw him as a vulnerable, you know, a strong guy with a really good moral compass, but a person who's kind of broken to a certain degree. And I think that I identify with that because I'm broken to a certain degree. I sustained a lot of, you know, personal tragedy in my life. And so I understand that loss and how you navigate that. Now, how I navigate it and how Harry has navigated it are two very, very different things, but I understand it. And so I think that enabled me to have a real beat on who he is. But I've heard you say that you try not to bring yourself to a character because that's not acting. But inevitably, given we're going to talk about your history and all of that, but

your life experience informs how you're going to inhabit this person. Your life experience informs how you're going to inhabit this person. experiences from my own life to sort of move myself in that direction performance-wise and then to try to perform was that all that I ultimately was doing was I was reliving a very painful memory. And then when I would try to act, I was so completely detached from the character and so connected to my own personal pain that I didn't feel like I was acting. And it felt, it didn't feel safe to me. It didn't feel good to me. And not that all acting has to be safe. I mean, I think it's about stepping out and taking certain risks. But then again, I think risk in acting is a very misused word because it's acting, right? It's pretend.

I mean, what is that? The risk is in the vulnerability. Exactly. But I think if you're playing a guy who's got a broken arm, you don't need to go slam, go break your arm so that you understand that you can, you can, um,

or playing a character that's overweight. Um, you know, I've done that. I've, I've gained like 65 pounds for a role and that's a different thing. Part of it was because I knew that, um, with that weight that I was going to move differently,

that I would breathe differently, that I would breathe differently, that I would certainly look different. And of course, I was young when I did that. I would be less inclined to do some kind of a crazy, well, at my age, it's a little bit stupid to put on 65 pounds for a part. You could do it. Yeah, I could do it. You're rocking a huge beard right now. Well, that's the weight I've gained. But I found that early on, that it wasn't something that was really servicing me as an actor. And then I met David Mamet, the playwright, and I studied with him.

And then I met David Mamet, the playwright, and I studied with him. And something that I learned from him is the process, which he sort of, his technique, for lack of a better word, was kind it relates to the action of what the character is literally doing on the page. And I found that that serviced me really well and consistently in performing because that's what it's about. I mean, there's always the worry. You're doing a play or something, which is obviously it's a very different medium than film but you you arrive at that place where you know the king has been killed and you have to mourn him and you know where how do you arrive at that place every night where um and and what i kind of realized was that um you know to to demonstrate emotion certainly pain and anguish, didn't necessarily have to translate as tears, which presented a whole new bunch of questions for me as an actor.

And I just find also that when the writing is really good and when you're working across the table from another actor and that focus and concentration is on each other to sort of take the attention off yourself and put it on the other person and the writing is good the you don't have to necessarily work as hard you know it becomes it sort of happens organically to a certain degree because you just kind of invest in that moment in these imaginary circumstances, and they kind of have their own life. Right. You still have control over it.

But that's just for me. I have many friends who are deeply steeped in the method world, and they work that way, and they navigate it really well. It's got gotta be exhausting though yeah i mean under any circumstances when you put you know because people say to me oh when you come home after a day of working on bosh you know you are you depressed and i say no because i'm i'm acting i'm able to separate that now is the material heavy are there scenes that are harder to play than others particularly when they particularly when within circumstances of dealing with tragedy? Sure. But I don't carry that necessarily home.

It affects me in the moment when I'm playing the scene. But I'm not dragging my feet when I come home because I've had to shoot a scene where I'm doing a notification, a death notification to a victim's family. Right. Were you part of Mammoth's theater company? Well, all my classmates were. Were they? Wow.

I don't know. I was always one of those guys that wasn't big on clubs and things like that. Yeah. And that whole thing was kind of birthed out of one of Mamet's. He had a great knack for throwing challenges out. And because we were all sort of eager to please, he said one day, who in here wants to start a theater company? And who wants to write a book about this technique? So everybody shot their hands up. And I might have been the only one who just sort of kept my hands on my lap because my thing was there were a couple of companies that came out of nyu there was the atlantic theater

company with mammoth and then there was the naked angels company that also came out of there and these were we were all in the same class and my thing was that i was really interested in doing the work as an actor and working with these companies, but I'm not a political person. And so I didn't want to be involved with that process of decision-making and the kind of infighting that goes in and power struggles and things. I'm not interested in that. I like to show up and do my thing and not be a part of that. But it had to be amazing, though, at the early stages of that to be with Mamet. I mean, you've worked with some amazing writers.

But to be with a master and develop that appreciation and respect for the written text when well done. Well, that completely. Appreciation and respect for the written text when well done. of the process as an actor when you're interacting with the writing and how to to me I felt like it became sort of a personal challenge and then to go from working with Mamet to working with another great writer like David Milch right it it really informed a lot about how I wanted to act and how I wanted to relate to writers and also the protection of the writing, but also the challenge of trying to beat the page. I always sort of feel like when somebody puts a great piece of writing in front of you as an actor, it's kind of your job to not only facilitate the writer's vision to the best of your ability, but to kind of get in there and kind of kick its ass a little bit at the same time. And maybe do something, bring some nuance to that that the writer might never have considered.

In terms of language or like inflection, like how you're embodying it? In terms of language or like inflection, like how you're embodying it? Intention, yeah. Intention of, or how to demonstrate the writer's intention by kind of making it your own. Right. something with David and, you know, would complete a scene and, and, and have David, you know, Milch say, you know, I, I didn't consider, you know, I didn't consider this. Right. I didn't consider that. What made you think of that?

Personal victory. Yeah. Yeah. And, and it is, but it's also becomes, then it feels more like a collaboration. And I certainly have that on Bosch with with um tom bernardo and eric overmeyer and daniel pine and and all these great writers and of course michael connelly being the center of it all um any any kind of bosh questions that have ever come up or ideas i always um would run them up the flagpole with Michael and discuss them.

Is this something, a place that we can go? Does this resonate? Does this seem like Bosch? And he, you know, now that being said, I didn't feel like I needed to make gigantic changes to this character. There were just some little things to make it a little bit more personal in my interpretation because we already had to change his age and things like that and we don't you know we don't follow the books chronologically so we kind of move all over the place and michael has always been um really receptive to that and and uh and there's no uh

really receptive to that. And, and, and there's no, there's no ego. It's not ego driven in that way. You know, I mean, and I've come up with things where he's, he said, I like that idea, but I don't, it doesn't seem like, like a Harry thing. Fortunately it hasn't been all that often, but I'm also not going to him all the time and saying, you know, why can't, can he drive a black Porsche and wear leisure suits? I don't know where that came from. But things you feel would be germane to something that Bosch would do.

Yeah, and the Harry of the show is, the thing that I've always held fast to, no pun intended, was to really maintain the integrity and the integrity and the core of who that character is in the books because he's so perfectly realized. And I get to the point now where there'll be certain bits of dialogue that'll come across in scripts and I'll tweak it because to me, while it might be a great piece of dialogue in that moment, there's just things that need to be moved around a little bit in order for it to feel like it's coming out of his mouth. This could go on forever. I mean, Connolly is so prolific. What, he's written like 32 novels or something? Yeah.

How many? There's like 20 Bosch books? 21, I believe, Bosch books. And a new one coming out. prolific what he's written like 32 novels or something how many there's like 20 21 i believe right books i mean you can a new one coming this could just be you know go on ad infinitum well you're going into season six season six when do you start shooting we start shooting that in august but you know mike said recently somebody asked him i don't remember where the the question popped up but asked him how how long how much longer how many more bosh books he'll write because now he's brought in this new character

this other detective renee ballard and uh and she's younger harry's retired and so now he's combining uh these characters are inhabiting each other's world, but they're doing it kind of simultaneously. They're crossing over. Yeah. So it'll be interesting. I mean, look, if Mike stopped writing Bosch books tomorrow and we were going into season 20 or whatever, that character is so well established now that the writers, and they do anyway, they are able to sort of, within the Bosch universe that's been created, they come up with ideas and stuff. Yeah, it's literally a franchise. Yeah. It's unbelievable. What I'm interested in, I mean, look, you've worked with essentially everybody in the business over the course of your career.

And look, you've worked with essentially everybody in the business over the course of your career. But the roles that have really defined you, at least from my outside perspective, relate to filmmakers, writers, creators with whom you've developed almost this mentor relationship or co-collaborator relationship. Like whether it's Milch, you've done all of Ben Affleck's movies, now Connelly, like what is the distinguished, like what distinguishes like these great minds, these prolific creators from other people that you work with? And, you know, why these guys, like why do you have this more intimate relationship with some filmmakers other than others? Well, I think I got, I've just been very fortunate in that way and then i've come into contact with people that um you know maybe on some level we're we're kindred spirits for for lack of a better word you know um and some of that just happened are are are almost questions that are difficult for me to answer. You'd have to ask them. You'd have to ask them what is it that they see.

I suppose part of it is I'm really dedicated to what I do. And also, as for writers, I'm very dedicated to servicing the writing because I understand it. So it's not just about me showing up and learning my lines. I've never approached it that way. And it's not like I come in like a bull in a china shop and say, okay, I'm here now, so let me completely reconfigure what you've established here. I like to think it's because I have a

modicum of intelligence and these people recognize also that I have a good work ethic. And if anything, I strive to make things better. I'm not a big believer in coming in and being pedestrian because that's my face on the screen and I don't want to half-ass anything. Yeah. Well, there's, there's talent, there's ability, and that will take you to a certain place, but then people want to work with people they like, that they feel safe with that they feel like they can get along with over the

long haul, I would imagine. Yeah. And it's not to say that, that I've not in working with those people that i've not had um disagreements about things but there's a there's a foundation of respect there's a foundation of respect and there's also a way to uh it never has it's never been uh a power struggle it's always been a thing of and i i suppose there's at times that I sort of present these things to them and say, right, wrong, or indifferent, I have this idea. And that it's considered, you know what I mean, with respect. I mean, there were times with things with Milch where I would come up with something and Milch would say, you know, that's a great idea.

Not for this show, but that's a great idea but not for this show but it's a but it's a great idea and and i accept that with equanimity because for me i'm also um despite the fact that i'm i'm 57 years old i feel like i'm i'm in a constant state of you know evolution as uh you know as an artist and so i I, I always sort of, I never want to, um, give myself a break. Uh, I want to be challenged and I want to, I want to get better at what I do. And, and the older I get, um, I, I think that I've figured some things out to a certain degree. I certainly know as an actor what things work for me technique-wise. And I'm not an actor who does multiple takes of things. I can't work that way. I don't run up to something. I come in. I'm prepared. I make certain choices prior to shooting. If I have questions or things, I would discuss it with the director or the writer. But that being said, when I come in, I'm not intractable.

You know, I also like to seeheartedly to an idea because I just find that that makes it kind of stagnant. Do you like rehearsal? You seem like a guy who wants to, who's more in favor of being present to the magic in the moment. Yeah, I mean, the rehearsal process, certainly in theater, is absolutely necessary, right? It's a whole different animal. The technical aspect of film and television is a very different way of working. And so I tend to, within film and television i don't like to

rehearse um i i i like to rehearse for cameras so that you can kind of say well i'm gonna i'm gonna sit here or i might get up or etc etc so that the you have to do it again yeah the direct the cinematographer knows whereographer has a sense, and the director is saying, then they can come back and go, oh, I didn't visualize you sitting for this whole thing. And then you kind of bandy that about. But as far as rehearsing, rehearsing,

I mean, I don't mind technical rehearsals, but I don't want to sit down and do a series of rehearsals before we shoot because I feel like that bleeds the authenticity out of it. And it makes people self-conscious, and then they really start acting. And then it has a very, very different feel to it. Or they get locked. They get a closed mindset. This is what I'm going to do. Right. And then you see them when they'll do something in a master. And you can always tell

within the master shot, they'll do this one particular thing. And immediately, I get clued in and I go, oh, that's the red flag. They've got that. That's their thing for this. And what you don't want to do is, well, you don't want to interfere in another person's process or be disrespectful to that. That's when it becomes a little bit tricky because you have to be sensitive to the other actor. on a show, when you see something that doesn't ring right, you know, or tonally within the scene, you see somebody make a choice that's really broad and doesn't necessarily help tell the story. Because I always say, hey, look, if you're going to make a choice, make a choice that's going to help tell the story.

Because it's very easy to get. And look, when you're, I mean, when I was a young actor. How can I draw the attention to myself? Oh, I was all about business. And I'm going to eat peanuts here. And I'm going to drink the beer. And I'm going to smoke a cigarette. And I'm going to clean my gun.

And what I realized as I got older was I didn't have to do all that shit. If it wasn't telling the story, it just was business. And so now I'm terrible. Directors will come in and go, yeah, maybe you're making yourself a cup of coffee. And I'd say, what? The character's already had his cup of coffee. But there's a stillness to Bosch, too. And the proximity of the camera lends itself to subtlety.

And that's by design. I mean, when I read the script, one of the first things that I felt about that character was that there was a great power in his stillness. This was a guy who didn't necessarily subscribe to the societal norms that you and i do he is not a guy who walks into a room and wants to win the day you know he doesn't give a shit what anyone thinks about him and it's not that he's that he's a prick or he's a or that he's a bad guy he just has uh

limited uh patience for for he's unapologetic about who he is. And there's something kind of interesting and refreshing about someone who comes in, because there are also times when he sticks his elbows out. But I felt a real... I felt that I gravitated towards the stillness of that character. Because really when you read the books and when, you know, he's an observer. He's a guy who's in a constant state of observation.

And also a guy who doesn't want to draw attention to himself. So, you know, and that's difficult stuff to act to a certain degree. And also when you consider that that a lot of of stuff that's going on internally with bosh when you you you have the luxury of the of the narrative uh to for the reader to be able to say this is what's going on in his head he's doing that but so but how do you translate yeah without it's without the kind of noir trope of using a lot of voiceover right which we don't do i mean i remember at one point somebody making a joke early on and i i thought they were serious when they said yeah maybe the voiceover thing and i just yeah i went that'd be okay if we were doing like a 1940s 1950s thing

then you you do that and you establish that and that's okay but this is neo-noir and so my my thought and particularly in these moments in the show where you'll find Harry by himself looking over a murder book or being contemplative or just observing the city, you know, I treasure those moments. Because those moments really challenge me in that I've got to, in some way, project some internal life and some, you know, inner emotional life with this character without dialogue. Right. And – Yeah, how do you manifest that in your physicality? And I think that that comes through not only the relationship to being still, but also having, you know, two great cinematographers that know. We've now been doing this going into six years.

They know how I work. They know where it's going to come, not necessarily when. And it becomes about where they're moving the camera to kind of arrive at that place to find Harry. where they're moving the camera to kind of arrive at that place to find harry and and you know i i have people with some frequency um say that to me that they they like they really like those moments they go i know i know you're not saying anything but there's a lot they read it as well they're fans of the book too they can project you're there's a there's a blankness upon which they can project their idea of Bosch.

Right, which is, you know. And you have little secret, like you have little secrets too, or techniques. Like I read or heard you say at some point, like when Harry doesn't like somebody, he looks at the person's forehead, like tiny little things that you can rely on that the audience might not be consciously aware of, but feed that character sensibility. Yeah. Well, there's a lot. It's funny, too, because there's a lot of,

there's the Harry in the books, and my interpretation of that Harry in the books, and then personality traits of male figures who have influenced me. My father, me, one of them. Warts and all. And David Milch. Men who have had influence.

Right. Both like hard-boiled guys. Yeah. nonsense, hard, but also very sensitive and vulnerable men. I mean, there's a lot of- What's that weird combination of artist sensibility with traditional values about hard work and not taking any shit from anybody. Right. And I think also that's what makes him, what makes Harry good at his job is that he's not a guy who would ever bend the rules

and certainly ethically he's not going to beat a confession out of a suspect and he's not going to plant evidence on someone to gain a conviction. You know, there's that kind of dogged pursuit of justice. And he really is that guy who is the advocate for the victim and for the victim's family. And there was a great line, and we've repeated it since then, where people have referenced closure. And Bosch says closure is a myth, you know, because that's, and that's true.

Well, that was the arc of the season of solving, you know, your wife's murder, right? Like that he arrives at that place of solving it to realize that the closure didn't carry the meaning that he was searching for. And, and, and also the, you know, finally figuring out who it was that, that, that killed his mother, that it, that it was empty ultimately right his mother that's what i meant and that he couldn't that he couldn't really reconcile that right i mean there's

a part of him that sort of is able to to close that chapter you know in his in his history, but the damage and the pain is something that he'll, I don't think that people ever can outlive that pain to assuage their pain. You can't. You find a place to be able to navigate that so that you can get out of bed in the morning and that you can be a productive person in life but that pain you know imagine you know a 13 year old kid his mother is murdered you know and and uh and that's the that's the impetus for him to because nobody gave a shit because his mother was a prostitute and so the effort into solving her murder was to a lesser degree which hence you have Harry's thing everybody counts or

nobody counts and you know that's a that's a that's a big that's a big load and he carries that I mean that's the thing also with it. There is a world weariness with Harry. And what we've been able to do is that through his relationship with his daughter, and those are scenes that I probably treasure the most of all the scenes that I do on that show, is working with Madison Lentz. I mean, A, I'm a father, I understand, but I'm also not Harry Bosch. So I have been in my children's lives, whereas he was kind of an absentee parent.

And now he's thrust into the world of being a parent and being present and figuring out how to navigate and be a parent when he doesn't have any skills. But it softens him. It does, and I think it's made him, for the first time in his life, I think you see a guy who's allowing himself to trust happiness a little bit. Because that's the one thing that I've carried

as a through line with Bosch. And people say, what is he about? And I say, and what is it you connect with? And I said, I connect, I connect and understand that thing. I'm not trusting happiness.

When you, when you are dealt a body blow like that, that's, that's what it becomes. And I feel that, that Maddie's presence in his life and now more than ever with eleanor having been killed that they're that they're together that he's he's trusting happiness again and it doesn't change him uh for uh his his uh way of pursuing justice for victims.

And I guess, yeah, softened him a bit. And yet, by the same token, there's an internal kind of terror that exists inside of him in caring for his daughter. He wants to protect her from all this stuff in the world. He's trying to imbue her with some sense of awareness and sometimes to the point where it's smothering for her. And she's kind of saying, hey, hey. She's pushing back. She pushes back, but she's also his daughter.

And she's a strong woman, young woman. So there's a lot of him in her, which he recognizes. But that also scares him. You know, while he's happy to see her development, he's also repelled by it. It scares him. Because he sees the path laid forward for her in a way that's too close to his own. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, it's been fun watching the show over the years, you know, this inextricable relationship connection between Los Angeles and the, you know, the sort of tradition of noir from Chandler and now, you know, in the embodiment of Connelly's work. But I've always, you know, enjoyed those movies and books at arm's length as somebody who's lived in Los Angeles for a couple decades. Cause we're out here in Calabasas. I've always lived West side and the Los Angeles portrayed in those works and in Bosch was always a Los Angeles

that I just didn't recognize at all. I'm like how it's like this mythic, how it's like this mythic, you know, at times antiquated picture of the city that I live in. But I've had this recent experience where my 15-year-old daughter is now in art school, which I want to talk to you about. She goes to this school that's east of downtown. And so we've rented an apartment in downtown LA because it's too far to drive from out here. And my wife and I take turns staying down there with her.

So I've been spending all this time. I spent half the week in downtown now. I'm running around MacArthur Park. I'm in Boyle Heights. I'm meeting a friend at a wood paneled restaurant with red leather banquet booths. And I'm like, this is the noir LA that I see depicted in all this work. And I've had moments where I'm like, oh, this is where Bosch would, you know, meet his buddies for a drink.

Absolutely. That LA exists. And Los Angeles is very strange in that your lifestyle is defined by the neighborhood, you know, the five mile radius in which you live. And there's a whole other world going on just a couple miles away in this very different place with people who are inhabiting lives that resemble the lives portrayed on the show. Yeah. Well, we're there. I mean, that's the thing. Harry Boschland, he works Hollywood Homicide. So that's where he is. He's downtown. He's in Boyle Heights.

He's in all these places. And then you have Hollywood. And, of course, you know, it's the great sort of metaphor. It is. It's the boulevard of broken dreams. You see all these. And that's the thing that always sort of intrigued me was the idea that all these people who came out here with hopes of fame and fortune and the endless tales of people who come out and then just kind of disappear. Right.

When it doesn't happen, they disappear. They go down these bad roads. And there are all these nefarious characters who prey on these people. And that's the thing. It's the facade. It's like going to a backlot on Warner Brothers or Universal. And you see, you know, you're in Europe, you know, and Universal, you go, oh, my God, you know, these cobblestone streets.

And then, you know, you walk around and there's, you know, four by sixes and things that are propping up these facades. And then you, you know, you walk around and there's, you know, four by sixes and things that are propping up these, these, these facades. And there, and there's a lot of that here because there's so much, it's so enticing in that way to a certain degree to people. They look at it and it's, oh, everybody's, everybody's rich and everybody's famous. And no, they're not, you know, and then you, you know, you walk down Hollywood Boulevard after 8 o'clock at night, and even now so. I mean, no matter how much they try to clean it up and make it different,

it's like downtown. It's the same thing. It's broken. It's broken. You see people refer to the zombie apocalypse. And I say, these aren't zombies. These are people that have been discarded by society, that are either mentally ill or have lost their jobs or have chemical dependency issues and things like that. Or, you know, nobody. And it saddens me because particularly when I hear these aren't necessarily people that I know

because I don't associate with people who think that way. But the idea that these discarded people are just kind of zombies and, oh, well, you know, the only way to turn downtown into its own sort of emerald city is to get rid of all the homeless people and clean it all up. And then it'll all be fine. And then things will thrive down there.

Well, downtown has found a way to thrive. It's there. I have lots of friends who spend time there and go and eat in restaurants down there. I've never really had a connection there until I was shooting down there all the time. And it's, you know, it saddens me, but it's sort of like the more they try to slap a coat of paint on it, it feels to me that it sort of exacerbates the existing problem. Yeah, I think it just foments the problem.

I've had some interesting experiences because I live, our place is really close to Skid Row and I'll go running in the morning and I'll purposely run through Skid Row because I just, I want to have the visceral experience of what's actually going.

And I've done stuff with that community in the past. But what I've noticed is that I never feel unsafe running through there. No, I don't either. To an observant's eye, it looks dangerous. I mean, for people that don't know, it's literally a tent city. It is. It goes on for like, it's a square mile. It looks like Bangladesh.

Yeah, basically a third world country right in downtown Los Angeles. And I'll run right down the middle of the street. And, you know, I get nothing but smiles and waves and hey, how you doing? And keep going. Like way friendlier than the people up on the trail. Right, right, exactly.

Around here. Yeah. And there's a sense of community and connectivity that those people have, you know, amidst this tremendous despair, this impoverished state in which they live. And it's a horrific sight. And yet, there's an inescapable heart and humanity to it. Well, it's part of the ugly reality, right? That we look around and we see people

families living inside of tents and they're not all these are not indigent people that have you know have ruined their lives with alcohol or drugs or what have you or these are people who have lost their jobs who have worked at places and have busted their asses for years and years only to be told hey we're downsizing the job that you did is being outsourced to a robot or to to pakistan or or what have you um we shoot down there a lot so i've had a lot of interaction with with people there and met some really wonderful and interesting people who who have incredible stories to tell and we you know because we go into these environments as this as a big hollywood production um and yet we have we have executive producers um who are human beings who who recognize that we are

sort of inflicting ourselves to a certain degree on this place to sort of capture this for entertainment. And so there's always extra food brought along, cases of water and things like that. I mean, these are small gestures. We can't go in and solve the ills of society. But I've had a lot of interaction with people. And they're very funny because a lot of these people have seen me in films and television shows and things. And one of the first times we went down to the bins

where homeless people put their things in these storage bins and we were shooting there. The idea that I was interacting with them, several of them were kind of vexed by it. Well, you're a big star. And I say, well, first of all, I'm not a big star. I'm a working actor. But you're talking to people.

And I say, but why wouldn't i and then and was felt kind of saddened by that and yet once once the people realize that i was not that that guy but was just a i've had you know there are people that i kind of see the same people sometimes it'll come down and down and, hey, how are you doing? And da-da-da-da. And interacting. And yeah, I don't feel unsafe when I'm down there. I feel quite the opposite.

I feel like it's people just trying to live. Live in really harsh circumstances. But just trying to live with some dignity. I don't know what the solution is, but whatever we're doing right now is not working. No, it's not working. It's not working at all. And a barge out into the middle of the ocean, which we always sort of joke, that's what happened to New York.

I mean, I had moved out of New York, and then I came back two years later, and I was saying to my brother, where are all the homeless people? Where are these people that? And you do, particularly within a neighborhood scenario. You sort of forge these relationships, particularly with a lot of the people in New York that were mentally ill, yet when they were treated. A neighborhood takes care of them. A neighborhood takes care of them. A neighborhood takes care of them. And also says, hey, please don't pee on the doorstep. Right.

I just always think of my mother who would, our leftover food never went into the refrigerator. My mother would put it into baggies and things and she would, it always made me nervous, she would would go out and if she didn't find any people to give the food to she would write a note you know and place it in a place where it would you know and it would say this is good food and i was raised that way that you extended yourself um and uh a lot of times particularly you know people who weren't from my neighborhood, I would go out in the world and my neighborhood,

and people that I was with would see how I would interact, and they would go, that guy was really crazy. And I would say, he doesn't mean any harm. You have these conversations with him. And I said, he's a human being. It's not his fault, item A. And I'm not conversations with him. And I said, he's a human being. It's not his fault, item A. And I'm not threatened by him. I can tell if he's just come out of a long stay at Bellevue because his clothes are slightly less disheveled.

He looks cleaner. And he's got a baseline. But I say, then within a couple of weeks, he's going to be shouting at people on the street because he's not getting his medications and things like that. Well, when you're in New York, when you live in New York for any extended period of time, you develop that like radar. Like you can tell the difference between someone who's dangerous and someone who's, you know, neutral and not a threat. And there's all those cues that you just intuit into your life. Yeah. But let's take it back to your background.

I mean, you had an incredibly interesting, eclectic childhood raised by two artists. Yeah. I guess you would say it was somewhat rarefied, although to me it was normal because all the kids that I grew up surrounded by painters and poets and illustrators and musicians and film directors and screenwriters and sculptors. And so we were all kind of, being the children of these people,

we were kind of latchkey kids in the art world. And so to us, that made a lot of sense. It was when we sort of strayed from outside of that, which was familiar to us. And somebody would say, oh, what do your parents do? And I would say, they're artists. Or I remember saying to a kid, oh, my dad's a painter. And he said, oh.

And my dad, oh, well, my dad wants to paint our house. Maybe he could. And then sort of that became kind of difficult for them to wrap their minds around. And I think in that, people say, well, obviously, because that was your environment, that was the natural leap. But my parents never, they didn't really do that with us. I mean, it was never, I mean, there was always paper and crayons and pencils and things in my parents' studio. And of course, yes, you imitate to a certain degree that which you see in your environment. But my parents never pushed.

Foisted it on you. Never whatsoever. Your mom was a fashion illustrator. Yeah. And your dad was a very successful landscape painter. His work is like, he's been everywhere, like the Met, Roma, revered, successful artist. And you expressed some interest in this as a young person right and he started to teach you at age 12 like this was going to be the path for you yeah and and i i think

you know full disclosure that was initially the idea of that was seeking my father's approval, trying to find a common ground in which I could relate to him. Because he was a very intense guy. He had an enormous capacity to love, but he was an intense, intense man. He was an intense, intense man, somewhat of a rageaholic and not the most patient guy. I mean, there are certain traits of his that have crept into my DNA. And there are times when they eke out and I'm mortified by them because they were things that really were a source of tremendous difficulty for me as a kid. That being said, I kind of fully immersed myself in that world with my dad and he was,

you know, he was hard, but I mean, it was also good that he was hard you know my parents were never ones to to just shower praise on my siblings and myself just to do it you weren't a very special snowflake no i i in that way you know i'm it it didn't work out i mean i would do a drawing and i would my mother was was was much more sort of sensitive and diplomatic about it. Whereas my father would kind of correct it and be very critical of it. But I also, I signed up for that. So by the time I was around 15, 16, I had kind of gone through this sort of formal training with my father as far as learning how to paint

and mix color and have an understanding of that and drawing. And then, so then I'm in high school and I'm in art class and I was bored out of my mind. I was just bored because part of it was that I already really, there wasn't anything they could teach me. And I had the same experience when I went to art school. They couldn't teach me anything. I'd already been taught all of the technical things that were important. And I had a good grasp and understanding of that. And what I really needed to do was to paint on my own

and kind of find my own eyes find my own voice, right? So after a kind of unproductive year at art school at Bennington College, in which I just kind of partied my head off, and I have great memories of that year, it was not the most productive and so when i came out of that and my father was pissed and understandably you were just there one year i was just there a year is that uh braddy stenellis went to bennington yeah you guys there at the same time he was there after i was there and uh and so i i knew i wasn't trying to my father was going to be angry i mean they basically said to me why don't you take a leave of absence and then decide if you want to.

Because basically, what we're looking at academically for you is you just haven't shown up. I mean, you've shown up to your painting classes, and you've done some good paintings, and you have talent. But you're not, you know. I just didn't have any self- You didn't have the passion for it? I didn't have the discipline, really. I didn't have the discipline, really.

I didn't have the self-discipline. And so my remedy for that was that I thought, well, this really comes down to a self-discipline thing. I'm going to join the Marine Corps. And I thought that would kind of straighten me out. And my father said, well, before you join the marine corps you're you got to come home he was very upset and he kind of put me into this what we my brothers and i called the inward bound program aka and i don't know if i can swear you could swear but we he referred to it as Camp Fuck Up. And all my brothers and I attended Camp Fuck Up. And within that time, while I was sort of installed in a little Cape guest house on my father's land up in Maine, I lived kind of like Thoreau.

It was no girlfriends, no hanging out, boxes and boxes of books, which my father— The agenda was some kind of academic curriculum? Yeah. Or what was the daily routine? I lived—and then there was a plot of land that needed to be cleared so that we could harvest it for firewood. needed to be cleared uh so that we could harvest it for firewood he had a huge huge um just a whack of land several thousand acres and um and it was placed in a forever wild conservancy so it could never be subdivided or built upon and there was just his compound and then another little compound and and um so i you know there i was 18 years old living by myself in this in this cool

funky house with no electric no electricity no running water you know a an outhouse and going out in the morning getting up early and cutting firewood by myself and doing that and then keeping a daily journal reading these books and then he said you can either do you know an oral presentation about the book or you can write a paper. And because I was lazy, I just went, I don't know. I didn't want to subject myself to writing a paper, knowing that he would just be there with two fists full of red pens.

Wow, man. This is intense. It was really intense. And it was sort of the book showed up. And it started in Mesopotamia. And then it was working through the complete works of Faulkner. And it was kind of all over the place and Proust. And it just was endless.

And I would come into his studio. He could carry on conversations while he would paint. But that was like the inner sanctum. So either if you got called into my father's studio, typically it meant you were in trouble, which were referred to as studio talks, which we dreaded. Oh, my God. And usually it would be his head would come in a door.

He'd be in your room. I'd be with my siblings or something, and the door would open. My father would say, come in the studio. It's studio time. And we'd all kind of go like, oh, shit, man, no, this is not going to end well. So I did that, and it was painful at times. I can remember reading a book that was a tome, and then sitting with my father in a studio for four hours. He's grilling you.

Having the conversation and finishing it. And he said, yeah, you got to read that again. And to which, and I want to say, it wasn't War and Peace, but it was definitely dense, right? It was definitely dense right it was definitely you know russian literature you know and and uh and i said why do i have to read it again he said because he didn't get it and you know and there was no way my dad was one of those guys where if he said you're grounded for a month you were grounded for a month there was no wiggle room you didn't go to him after two weeks and say hey you know i've been i've been towing the line i'm doing the thing so you know can i get off on good behavior i mean he would hold it right right to the line and he

did that with me and then when he felt that i had kind of completed that task which uh he he i proceeded as me owing him something because he had he had sent me to school there and it was really more about me owing myself and i came out of that much stronger how long that go on for oh months it was all like almost a year wow and uh It was almost a year. Wow. But he said to me, what are you going to do now? And I said, we had many conversations. And one of them, we talked about painting.

And he said to me, when you're not thinking about girls and beer and smoking grass, what do you think about? Do you think about painting? And I said, no, I don't think about painting. I think about films and I think about acting. And he said, well, then that's what you should do. Because if it doesn't get you up in the morning and if it's not on your mind, you need to do what's on your mind. And that was really the first time I'd ever said that out loud. I'd never told. I mean, I did theater in high school and things.

But for me, it was kind of fun. Right. But that's when I really. And he said, well, then you better. You should go to New York. I want to go to Camp Inward Bound. We might all be a little bit better off. We all did a little Camp Inward Bound.

At the time, I resented it, and it felt like a punishment many, many times. Many, many times. But the truth of the matter is, of all the things that my father gave me while he was alive, that was the greatest gift. Yeah, it's a beautiful gift. And I wasn't able to see it until I was away from it and I was a little bit older that I went, oh. And just the extraction from society to isolate you, it's just you and him and books and nature, it is very thorough. I'm sure you had to, it allowed you to develop that intuition to even answer that question, like what do you think about?

Well, it did. It also, what it did was it made me real. It forced me to be comfortable with myself and to entertain myself. And so I spent, you know, when you have that kind of solitude, then when you're kind of brought back into society, there's less importance in certain social aspects. I mean, I'm very comfortable. I mean, I'm very comfortable. I mean, I'm a social person.

I like being with people and meeting people, but I'm also fine by myself. I like going for long, long, you know, I have a place in upstate Connecticut, and I like just walking around with my family, first and foremost, but I'm good being by myself. I don't have a, and I realized that prior to that, I really wasn't comfortable being left with my own thoughts. And it kind of forced me in that way.

It forced me to grow up, certainly emotionally, definitely intellectually. Emotionally, definitely intellectually, it kind of pulled me out of a level of kind of intellectual and emotional immaturity. I sort of, I grew up in that time. I kind of grew up. Now, that, you know, I've certainly regressed on many an occasion. But I will say that that was, in all the years that I was in school, I learned more in that time than I did in New York. Yeah, I would imagine so. So you end up in New York after that. Yeah, and not a very glamorous life you know working multiple jobs a lot of

shitty jobs and and you know sleeping on people's couches and not because i couldn't afford an apartment but it it prepared me for that so i had a i had a real survival instinct you know i never sat down and thought oh this is terrible it's so it's so hard hard. At 18, I was living on the Upper West Side in a funky little apartment with my girlfriend. We eked by every month, but it was OK. It was OK. And I studied at the HB studio in the beginning, the Herbert Berghoff studio, because first of all, it was only-

Austin Pendleton? Yeah. It was the only place I could afford. I never had Austin as a teacher. I had Bill Hickey, crazy Bill Hickey as a teacher, and Walt Wickcover and Uta Hagen. I had some great teachers there. I didn't get to know Austin until until many many years later he he produced

a play that lawrence fishburne and i did together that lawrence had written we did in new york but um you know it was it was the real deal i mean it was it was um intense and then i sort of felt like i was missing something. And I made the decision to go back to school, that I wanted to go back and continue my education. And so I applied to several schools. And then when I was accepted into schools, I needed to make a decision.

And I chose to go to NYU. And that was the best possible choice I could have made because that's where I connected with with Mamet and and lots of great actors and and and saw it through you know and but it was important to me I felt like that which had had been inspired by my time with my father. But I wanted to pursue that. I didn't want, you know, I kept thinking, yes, I love acting, but I'm also interested in anthropology and I love music. And so that was my return to go back.

Well, right. Yeah, so bringing a level of maturity to your education. And you said something really interesting was that it was important to you. You were doing it for yourself, not to impress your father. No, and that was the thing that was very liberating, was that to arrive at that place and to have that clarity, the realization that I was doing it for myself because it's what I wanted to do, rather than seeking the approval of my parents, that was very liberating. And it didn't, I mean, practically up until the time my father died, it was always the subject of dinner conversation.

At some point, the Bennington story had to come out. My father just, on some perverse level, really enjoyed tormenting me about that. Yeah, just twisting the knife with that. Yeah. Why were your siblings in uh inward bound different versions similar story yeah similar things just you know um you know he was a stern task master and i think what happened with a lot of us was that once we got out into the world and we felt you know those those tentacles weren't wrapped around our ankles, we kind of went wild.

Right. But you had this base skill set. You know, I think, you know, there's this idea that the artist's life is one of, you know, living with your head in the clouds. And here you have your father, who's this incredibly prolific, successful painter, but a total taskmaster. Yeah. Youmaster, a very disciplined man from what I gather, who valued hard work and didn't take shit and didn't suffer fools. And when I see the longevity of your career and how many people you've worked with, I can't help but think that you bring that level of discipline and that kind of work ethic to how you approach these roles. Well, I learned that. And I think that was the thing.

My father came from a staggeringly poor background. He grew up in rural northern Pennsylvania and did not know his father, so he was raised by his grandfather, who was a cabinetmaker and a very gifted guy, but it was a little town. People didn't go become painters there. And so from the time he was a little kid, he had incredible responsibilities, which of course it always falls into that category

of walking to school in three feet of snow, 12 miles uphill, and things like that. But the stories were true. And to a certain degree, I think they weren't necessarily cautionary tales. But we really had gratitude, always had gratitude as kids. gratitude, always had gratitude as kids. And my father made a big point of, he was a guy who would give his last dime to someone who needed it. That's just the way he was. I can remember him paying off a neighbor's mortgage on their farm. And it turned out that the bank that that held the mortgage was also the bank where my father banked and after he got a call the guy worked for us he was like a hired hand and he worked at my dad's place in maine it didn't come to work my father called his house

because the guy was never a minute late and talked to his wife and she said well the bank the the the bank guys are here and they're they're going to foreclose on the house. And my father got in the car and went down there, and he pulled out his checkbook and wrote a check for, I think, to the tune of, at that time, it was $15,000, $20,000. And he wrote the check, and he handed it to the tune of, at that time, it was $15,000, $20,000. And he wrote the check, and he handed it to the guy. And he said, he owns his house now. Go fuck yourself.

Oh, and by the way, after I leave here, I'm coming to the bank. I'm closing all of my accounts. Wow. And he had been banking there forever. And he had a very successful career he you know was was very very successful so that was a that was a lot of money that was sitting in their bank but for him that was a line that you know it was they were unethical the idea that they would bully a farmer who could barely you you know, scrape it together.

So this incredibly principled man, you know, that raised you, I mean, how does this inform how you raise your kids? I mean, you're a dad to three kids. We live in a very different culture than that. You know, obviously there's so much value in so many of those things that he taught you. You know, obviously there's so much value in so many of those things that he taught you, but it's a little, it would be a little bit out of the norm to be that kind of taskmaster in this day and age. I mean, you know, how do you, how do you take the best of that and, you know, channel it downstream to your kids? My kids have a very privileged life, but they've been around the world enough to see people who have nothing. I think that what I have done, what I strive to do with my kids is to teach them gratitude and kindness. And I see that in them.

They have great empathy. They're kind. They're not angels, I can tell you that. They are disciplined to a certain degree. But they're also 13, 17, and almost 20. So they're very normal in that way. Except they're all on your TV show. They're all, yeah. Yeah. Eamon plays your son. That's Quinn. Quinn plays your younger, young.

He plays the younger Harry Bosch. Right, okay. And then my daughter did a little cameo. But just to speak to nepotism, that they came to me when they wanted to cast someone who was going to play in some of these flashback scenes. They had met my kids. Eamon was slightly older at the time. And they asked, they said, does your son Quinn, he looks so much like you, maybe we could use him for these flashbacks. And I said, I don't know. And so I approached him about it. And at first he was nervous and said, I don't know, dad, I approached him about it. And at first he was nervous and said,

I don't know, dad, I've only, you know, I was the teddy bear in the Christmas play, et cetera, et cetera. And he ended up doing it. And he's really good on the show. But that just, you know, full disclosure, I didn't go to them when they were casting and saying, hey, how about hiring my kid? And then Michael Connelly had written the scene on the beach where this little girl comes and asks my daughter if she'll push her in the swing because the father is completely glued to his cell phone. And Michael had written that scene. He said, you know, it would be great if Cora could do this. Would she want to do it? So there's that. Now, that being said, what's kind of great with having all three of my kids being actors,

that certainly with my sons, for as long as we do this show, we can move them around in different points of Harry's life. Because they're both really, really good actors. And I certainly never, same thing as my father, I never pushed them into that. I never said, so do you want to be an actor when you grow up? And they're both musicians. They play a lot of music.

So who knows what they'll ultimately end up doing and my daughter she's 13 I mean she wants to be she's really interested in being an actor she's also very interested

in her iPhone too so that becomes the, you know. Thankfully, we didn't have distractions like that. I mean, my father felt that we didn't even watch a lot of TV. I watched television at my mother's house because my father was kind of anti-TV. You know, it was the 6 o'clock news. We didn't even have a color TV, I don't think, until I was in high school. Yeah, there is an important relationship between boredom and creativity

that we're losing our connection with. That scares me. I have an 11- and a 15-year-old daughter, and yeah, they love their iPhone. And it's problematic yeah it is particularly when you try to say hey given giving that a break you see uh the the it's like trying to pull a beer out of an alcoholic's hand yeah well and there's more and more you know data that's showing up now that that the, the relationship to these phones, because they're not phones. They're basically personal computers.

They're laptops. They're slot machines. In your hands. Yeah, they're slot machines. And so it's addiction. I find myself, I've got this thing on my phone now that tells me how much time I'm spending on the phone. Yeah. It's alarming.

It is alarming. Yeah. me how much time I'm spending on the phone. Yeah. It's alarming. It is alarming. Even when I feel like I'm consciously being careful to try not to use it. And there is a certain amount of some of it, which is a necessary evil to a certain degree,

as we are in a business of having to promote the things that we do. And social media is a very good way to do that and to reach people. And you can tell yourself that lie, like, oh, well, I need to do this for my work. Right. But in truth, it is an addictive relationship. And creativity spawns out of solitude, right? And so how do we cultivate that in our children's lives and in our own lives? It requires a lot of discipline, that discipline, and really being good with boundaries. Well, we didn't grow up with these same distractions.

Yeah, I wasn't formed by it. We had radio. We had hi-fis, as they called them. We had record players, and we had television, and movies were movies. There were no, I didn't, you know, the VCR came along well after we didn't have that. Yeah. And there are so many things to distract, and now it's all, you know, compressed into this one little thing that we carry around as being a form of communication. It kind of bums me out. I hate to sound like when I would bring up my kids,

it's a little too much. We're going to cut it down to this amount. And I remember my older son saying to me, Dad, we're not Amish. And I said, no, we're not Amish. But I said, the amount of time that you spend playing video games, it's not good. It's not good for you. And as somebody who's trying to find their voice, you've got to find space first. Well, you have to find. You also have to be able to what it goes back to

what i said you know you have to be comfortable being by yourself yeah you know to say you never have to be alone anymore if you know when we as kids if we said we were bored it was the worst thing you could possibly say around my father because he would then find a million things for you to do that you didn't want to do. And there was some, you know, I can remember one time saying I was bored. And my father's remedy for that was go upstairs and get the A Encyclopedia. I went upstairs to get the A Encyclopedia. I bring it down. Okay, what am I going to do?

Read it. What do you mean read it? Start. And so what was interesting was I was furious and sat there, and he never let anything go. So it was hours, and I'm sitting there. If he told you to do it, you were going to do it. No, you did it because we had a very healthy fear of my father.

And then it started to become this thing, reading the encyclopedia. And what was interesting was, at a certain point, it started to get good to me. Uh-huh. interesting was at a certain point it started to get good to me and i suddenly realized that these books that that were you know like the monolith from 2001 they were always so intimidating to me were actually great and i could skip over what i you know i didn't i didn't have to read everything. But what it did was it was a level of solitude. And my father would say, don't go and sit in the middle of the living room with that book. You go to your room and you close the door. And I suppose that's why sometimes there are nights when I can run the board on Jeopardy.

And I always attribute that. I'll turn to my kids and go, I don't know how I know that. No, I know how I know that. Did you get all the way to Z? No. No. I'm trying to remember the last. I got somewhere around M. And then I was out of the house.

Yeah. I mean, you can't even find encyclopedias anymore. I still have them. I still have my Encyclopedia Britannica. Yeah. And we had another one that dealt purely with science, which was great, the Encyclopedias of Science. But also, I loved to read. My thing when I was a kid, my iPhone when I was a kid were toys

and comic books. And that was my... My father would say, I don't want to, you know, why don't you read a book? You're always reading that fantastic four and no, no, no, no, no, no. Read a book. And I love to read. I, you know, I, I, I knew how to sort of divide my time. That's been the one thing with my kids that I have felt that I've, I've really had to kind of push a little bit harder on. And that's reading. Yeah. Because there's.

It's tough. It's tough there's... It's tough. It's tough to get young people to read. And then once they start to do it, hopefully they get hooked. I mean, my kids read not as much as I wish that they would, but the flip side of that is that all of my kids love films and they and they love to to sit and and and you know well i can sit with them and watch three three or four films if it's a rainy day it's a perfect opportunity to just sit and i'll say oh well we're gonna watch godfather one and godfather two yeah and you get to work with them. It's pretty cool.

Which is really, that's one of the many things. And also music. I mean, they're still within the household with all the distractions of iPhones and iPads, of which I suffer the same malady. there's music playing all the time my kids love music and um and they like to look at art they have you know they're that's the thing i mean somebody said oh you know what your kids will all end up being lawyers or doctors and i say well look you know same thing my father said to me i don't care what you do or doctors and i say well look you know same thing my father said to me i don't care what you do as long as it gets you up in the morning and as long as it fulfills you and um but alas i look at

all three of my kids i i would be surprised if they come to me and say i'm gonna go to medical school i'm gonna go to law school they're artists and i think that's that's kind of either it's in your dna or it's not in your dna so where's the uh the first like break you're living in new york yeah it was a lot of theater years and years of doing theater for no money having no agent agents were very very um hard to get when i was coming up and ironically i got sort of discovered in a bar an agent who had seen me in a play i was actually a mammoth play american buffalo that i had done off broadway and i was um i was in the saloon that i worked at it was my night off and i was shooting pool and this guy came over and uh said you're tight as well over and i thought jesus you know let me let me maybe um what did i do last week yeah well that was you know that was always a consideration and uh and he said he had seen me in this play

and he asked me who my agent was and i said i don't have an agent and i you know as you sort of navigate that you know that whole weird world you know you occasionally you know you connect with somebody and they seem legitimate and then there's a whole other there's a weird angle so i was very um i didn't jump right in and um i didn't call him back i mean initially he gave me his card and he said give me a call i want to i want to talk to you about representing you i didn't call him i just thought it was another bs thing and uh and then he tracked me down back through mutual friends at the bar because he drank at the bar. And so he said, what's going on?

You want representation or not? And I ended up going and taking a meeting with him. And he immediately had set me up with meetings. And on the third audition that he sent me on i got i got the part and it was a sort of a small walk-on scene in a movie called navy seals where i played this obnoxious redneck and who goes after charlie sheen and charlie sheen's this navy seal and he kind of beats me up and um and then i did the doors with oliver stone right and that was kind of a uh that was a long long um shoot so they would they're you know over months and months

they'd fly me out for two days and they'd say yeah we're not going to use you so they'd fly me back to new york and this kept going on and then i got cast in a film called The Lost Capone, which was a Turner, a TNT sort of movie of the week miniseries thing about Al Capone and his brothers. And Eric Roberts played Al Capone and Adrian Pasdar played the Lost Capone, who was Jimmy Capone, who kind of fled Brooklyn after he thought he was responsible for an opposing gang member's death. And he went on to become this marshal and change his name to James Hart, Two-Gun Hart. And during Prohibition, he was knocking over Al's illegal shipments of booze.

At least that was sort of the version that we told. I mean, it was a little bit glorified because apparently he wasn't the most honest guy. But that was the thing that I put on a bunch of weight for. Right. Like 60 pounds or something like that? Yeah, yeah. And then was pissed because I wasn't getting called in for the leading man roles. And it took me a year to lose that.

And my career in that way has been kind of a slow burn. And I think better than too much too quick. Certainly because while I was disciplined in my work, I was very much out and about all the time, big partier. And I don't know that I would have been able to handle success at that. Too much too soon. I think it would have, I would have probably crashed and burned. But you've all, like, it doesn't look like you had any dry spells. Like, you've basically been consistently working.

Consistently working, for sure. But there were definitely periods where, you know, where there were dry spells. And also me trying to step away from stuff. You know, I would get, because one of the, one of the, you know, the, it's such a cliche, but you do, you can, if you do something well, sometimes you get pigeonholed. I mean, how did you become, you know, the kind of hard ass cop dude? Cause you're like a sweet guy, you know, I don't, I don't, you know, in spending time

with you personally, it's not like you come off naturally that way. No. Maybe you were when you were partying all the time. I mean, yeah, definitely when I was deep in the tank, I was certainly, you know, there's a long and somewhat undistinguished list of people that I've had physical altercations with in my younger years. that i've you know had physical altercations with in in in my younger years um and to a certain degree uh had a bit of a chip on my shoulder um so i was very um for me it was easier to gravitate towards confrontation than not and some of that has to do with the way that I was raised, the kind of guy my father was. He was a very confrontational guy.

So I grew up in an environment where that was there all the time and kind of underlying. But I spent a lot of time. I tend to sort of nab those roles, the cop roles, because I spent a lot of time around cops. I was around cops. I had a lot of cop friends. So I'd go in to read for these characters, and it would resonate. The people would kind of go, oh, that's kind of great.

I remember a couple times people saying, were you a police officer before? And I'd go, no. Oh, what happened to your accent? I thought you were from Brooklyn. No, I don't have an accent. So I don't know. I don't know. I don't, you know, I certainly, now that being said,

I was doing those roles and that was fine, but I started to get a little bit bored because there's only so many ways you can reinvent the wheel particularly if it's not on the page and it was it came along the time it was the second i want to say the second season of nyp nypd blue the word all changed where i got a call oh they want you to come in and uh read for this role of playing this trauma surgeon, this doctor. And I thought, because I had been so conditioned to what Hollywood's perception of who I was

and what I should be playing, I remember saying to my manager, I don't want to waste a meeting with David Milch and Stephen Bochco for a role that they're not going to cast me in. And he said, well, that's're not going to cast me in. And I said, well, that's the one. That's the one. So I went in, and I kind of pulled myself together. I put on my reading glasses and buttoned myself down and combed my hair. And I ended up getting, I was sort of cast right on the spot.

Milch said to me, you want to play this role? It's you. And that came in a moment, and it completely changed the perception of, A, what I could do. And suddenly I was playing, well, I said I went from being monosyllabic to polysyllabic with one character. And that was this role of Dr monzac on mypd blue and i would they would bring me back here and then they they'd pull me back in for something

you know sipowitz uh was had a friend who had dementia or he was having you know um was denit did you do erectile dysfunction was the american buffalo that you did with Dennis France? No, no, no. That was, I can't remember the director's name. That was with Dustin Hoffman. And I can't remember the kid's name. That was the film. The guy was from Providence, Rhode Island.

Anyway, so then all of a sudden, I not just being, you know, called in to be the cop or to be the knock around guy. Um, and I was playing lawyers. I was playing, playing dads, but there was always sort of a pull also at the same time to play tough guys, villains, which they're actually fun characters to play. I always say it's more fun to play the guy with the black hat than the white hat. For one thing, the sky's the limit. You're playing villains.

These are people who don't play by the rules. And so there's something kind of insanely heady about playing people who don't play by the rules. They just kind of, and I knew guys who were in organized crime. I observed those guys. So I knew who they were. And to watch them come into an establishment where people knew who they were and the kind of deference and also still the kind of fear that they instilled in people, despite the fact that they were being incredibly charming when they would walk in, shaking everybody's hand and, hey, how you doing?

Na, na, na, na, na, na. They would walk in shaking everybody's hand and, hey, how you doing? Na, na, na, na, na, na, na. You knew that 90% of the people that were interacting with them, they felt that it was out of survival. They were scared. They weren't looking at these people and saying, oh, you know, hey, he killed a couple people. But really, at the end of the day, he's just a nice guy. Yeah. So those, and also, I don't like to stigmatize characters as being you know if you i always

say if you're playing a villain you know you can't have judgment on it you can't have judgment on don't play the result don't come in you know unless of course you're doing a disney character or something like that um where it's required to to tele that. Well, that's a more one-dimensional portrayal. Yeah, and it's not as interesting. Of a bad guy. Yeah, it's just not as interesting. So those, and some of those villains, they were really fun to play.

I mean, Jimmy O on Sons of Anarchy, just, you know, that was a really. That was a bad dude. He was a really bad guy. He was a really, and a bad dude he was a really bad guy he was a really and uh and yet my thought about him was just a guy who he was just a businessman who had initially kind of started out as a guy on the righteous side of being in in in the ira in the Irish Republican Army, under the tyranny of the British government that the guy was a soldier.

But then he got into selling guns, and then he kind of got corrupted and sort of lost his way and became just another common criminal. How was it working with Kurt? Great. It was great. Sutter and I had a lot of fun. We remain friends to this day, and he's always been very supportive of other work How was it working with Kurt? Great. It was great. Sutter and I had a lot of fun.

We remain friends to this day. And he's always been very supportive of other work that I've gone on to do. I really enjoyed working with him a lot. He's an extraordinarily bright guy and very funny. I mean, he always cracks me up the way he refers to himself as Walter Mitty with anger issues. I mean, he's another guy who, when you spend time with him, you're like, he's kind of a sweet teddy bear. But he has this persona, this larger-than-life bad guy persona. And he's intimidating because he's a big dude. Yeah.

And he's got some anger stuff. Yeah. For sure. But he's a big dude. Yeah. And he's got some anger stuff. Yeah. For sure. But he's sweet. Yeah. At his core, he's a very, very sweet guy. And particularly you see him with his kids. Yeah.

Well, I think with all of us, right? That becomes a thing. I mean, that which we, how we are in the world. And then it's our children, our lives ultimately in that way, right? People always say, oh, when you're, what is that? How do you define being a parent? And I say, you define being a parent is when you become a parent, you have one of two things. Either you go, oh, I'm a a parent or you have the realization it's this incredible epiphany of what a what true love is and also selflessness it's at that where you say i would i would make the ultimate the ultimate sacrifice this is where i would do that yeah and

i think kurt is one of those people i mean mean, I think he uses his art, his writing, his creative expression as a way to exercise the demons that he has within so that he can be a present and loving partner and father. Yeah. So how does Ben Affleck come into the picture? Because you become like his dude. You're in all his movies

I mean they're all like crazy awesome he's a great filmmaker I mean the mustache that you were rocking gone is like will go down in cinema history it's one of the all time great mustaches in movies except for Sam Elliott

that's true yeah well nobody can grow a mustache like that guy. But the handlebars down the side, that was something to behold. That was a... The chops. I had just finished shooting Deadwood, or we were finishing it up, and I read the script, Gone Baby Gone, thought it was great, went in to be put on tape for him to see.

And it was also the first time that i'd seen something since uh the friends of eddie coyle which was a film that i love so much that takes place in boston really deals with those kind of um underworld characters and um so i went in and i got put on tape and then i didn't hear anything forever and ever and ever. And then months later, my then manager says, hey, you got a call back for Ben Affleck. And I said, for what? For Gone Baby Gone? I said, oh, Jesus, is that still going on? He said, yeah.

So I go in. I kind of prepare myself again and go in and read for Ben. And it's sort of like the typical come in hi hi okay let's just you have any questions no i'm just going to jump in and do the couple of scenes and then ben starts you know he starts the conversation after the audition and like a half a minute in, he goes, what happened to your accent? What accent? He said, are you from Boston? I said, no, I'm not from Boston. And I said, no, my mom lived in Boston.

I went to boarding school in Maine, and I have a lot of, you know, I've had a lot of, you know, connective tissue with New England and everything. So I know that. I know the accent. And when I got there before the meeting, I was looking around and the waiting room was filled with all these. Boston guys. Well, no, they weren't.

But they were all really established character actors who were older because that character was at least 15 years older than I was when I played it on screen. So I remember thinking to myself, it's going to be a stretch. Now, when I went in, I had hair down to here, and I was still doing Deadwood, so my beard was twice the size it is now. So I kind of had my hair pulled back and made a little bun to try to pull that off.

But I remember seeing all these character actors and just thinking, yeah, it's great that I'm getting to come in, but it's not going to happen. And then I was cast. And I think the – first of all, Ben's an extraordinarily bright guy. He's a really, really intelligent man. Yeah. I've heard that from a lot of people. And very funny. I mean, hysterically funny. And we just, we kind of hit it off. Not kind of, I mean, we really, really hit it off. And then when we we really really hit it off and then when we after i was cast you know he said look i don't want you to don't cut your hair and don't shave

off the beard because i i don't we got to figure out what we're going to do with this character's look um and and uh so we got to boston We sort of ran through the whole thing. And I said, look, this long hair and this beard isn't going to work for this character. But I'd like to have a handlebar mustache and cut my hair short. But get it cut. Either I'll cut it myself or, you know, because I don't want to look like a guy who spends a lot of time on his appearance. like a guy who spends a lot of time on his appearance and so um i went into the to the hair trailer and and uh my friend trish sweeney who i worked with her on a couple of things um i said let's just make it look like it's it's a bad super cuts job which took more effort to

make it look like a bad super cuts job and then and he and he signed off on the mustache so i you know i took it all off in the mustache but that whole the whole process of making that film um here was ben who was that was the first time he was directing and um he just never had a sense of that. I mean, his confidence. I mean, he has great humility, don't get me wrong. But he knew exactly what he was doing. He was so well-prepared. It was a great cast.

I mean, I was Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman, just to name. And then Amy. Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman, just to name. And then Amy. We played siblings. And Amy Madigan played my wife. And it was just one of those. You felt like you were making a small independent film with a better.

With all these big time actors. Yeah. But it was great. I mean, just the energy on the set. And Casey and Michelle. Such a wonderful big time actors. Yeah. Yeah. But it was great. I mean, just the energy on the set and Casey and Michelle, such a wonderful cast of actors. It holds up so well. I mean, you really see somebody who understands their craft, the guy who made that movie. I mean, for a first time director,

even given that he's been around for a long time, I mean, that's a tall order to fill. Well fill well and that because the scope of that film was very very big it's not a small independent movie that is no it's not it's a big movie and the first time he showed me his first pass of the film i can't remember how long it was but i can i remember i went with my with my late wife. We went to his office. And he set us up with a big screen in one of the offices. And it's a long film. But it seemed to go by like that.

And he was kind of patiently waiting. And went, what did you think? And I honestly couldn't answer him. I was still in the film. I said to him, I don't know what to say. And he went, what do you mean? And I said, I have to digest what I've just seen. Because it was one of the first times where I watched something that I had acted in

and was not aware. Right. You weren't like, Oh, this was, that was the day that, you know, we started late and,

you know, there was none of that. Wow. Nor was I watching my performance and going, yeah, or that take, or I don't like that angle. Or I just,

I was completely drawn into the film and got lost in the film. And then, of course, he went on to do The Town, which now was, it still had that energy of being a very familial kind of independent world, but a huge budget and uh and that's the way the he he creates an environment a creative um collaborative environment where you you you really you know that you're uh involved with something that's that's special so you have have a sense when you're in the midst of shooting of the quality of the product that it's going to become. Because often I would imagine you might think it's all going great,

then you see it later and you're like, that's not the movie I thought we were making. Unfortunately, I've had a lot of those experiences where the thing feels like it's something and then you look at the final product, and I've just been gobsmacked at times where I thought, how could you take something that felt so right, and the end result just be so completely off the mark and wrong? But that's, look, without failure, in all degrees in life, without failure, you can't have any true success. You don't learn.

Well, it's a miracle any movie gets made. And when you see a bad movie, nobody signed up for a bad movie. No. Everybody went in with the best of intentions. It's just so difficult, I would imagine. And when something turns out great, I i mean that's just miracle upon miracle well and also the the whole uh kind of when i was coming up the independent film market was still really really strong you just see less and less of these sort of interesting little films although

they kind of they end up getting these these lives in the streaming thing yeah i mean we're seeing you know whether it's amazon or netflix or hulu and all these other streaming platforms are filling these lives and the streaming thing. Yeah, I mean, we're seeing, whether it's Amazon or Netflix or Hulu and all these other streaming platforms are filling that void that used to be the focus features and the Miramaxes of the world. It's an ebb and a flow. On some level, it seems like there's more outlets and opportunities now to work.

I mean, there's so much content being created. I can't, I'm like two seasons behind on Bosch. I can't keep up with everything that's coming at me now. No, it's hard because there is. I mean, every time you turn on the thing, there's something new, there's something new, which is good. And also, you know, with technology being where it is, I mean, people are going out and making films on their iPhones, right? And they have these- Soderbergh just made that movie, High Flying Bird, all with an iPhone, right? And they have these. Soderbergh just made that movie High Flying Bird. Yeah. All with an iPhone, right?

So, you know, back in the day, if you had a VHS, you could make, you know, a funky little thing, but it was never going to. Yeah. I know. I watched Argo a couple of weeks ago. That movie holds up so well. It's a good film. It's so good. It's a couple weeks ago. That movie holds up so well. It's a good film. It's so good.

It's a really good film. I really hope Affleck finds his way back to that kind of work. Oh, yeah. He's always got stuff going. He's always got things going. But he's a triple threat. He's a really, really great actor. And obviously an Oscar-winning writer.

I have to say, pound for pound, one of the best directors I've ever worked with. What is the difference between a great director and an everyman director? What are the qualities that you look for? Well, I think, first of all, he's the most prepared director i've ever worked with and that's not to say that other directors that i worked with weren't prepared there's he has an understanding of it in its totality i mean you can sort of the whole film is in his head when he's working um and he's not flipping open a screen and looking at a storyboards and a pre-visualization the whole thing is in his head it's it's cut in his head um and he knows he just knows every

aspect of it you know he's been he's probably committed the whole script to memory um and there's just something about his excitement. He's still, he hasn't become cynical in all the years that he's been acting and in this business and making films. He's not cynical. He still has that excitement, and that's very contagious. And he's very collaborative. He's very open, and you don't always find that

you know sometimes you just feel like a guest in somebody's house and and you know and you you don't want to turn down the broccoli or something for fear that you'll offend he's just very he's he's inclusive in that way within within the process and you know and he's also a guy who will who will say we got it is there anything you want to you want to do a free one you want to just throw it up in the air and see what happens he's very smart and i think that is just you know what what it is he's very very he's very intelligent so he he has all the departments are kind of covered he's very literary he has a very literate mind he has a really great technical mind so he understands the camera completely and editing.

And there's just a lot to be said for being very well prepared. I mean, there's nothing. It's all been carefully conceived, which doesn't mean that he won't deviate from that. Clear vision knows exactly what he wants. Clear vision, but it's also. But open-minded and collaborative. Yeah. Yeah. And so you've been in all of his movies if i if he was sitting across from me right now and i was like why is titus your dude i don't know what he would say i don't know what he would say he would say something he'd make a smart ass remark yeah he'd probably say

something wouldn't answer it directly no no hey even if you knew you're probably not going to tell me no no i don't i i you know he he would definitely make fun of me because he's he's he's prone to there's a lot of ball breaking also which is which is funny he the the sets are i mean some of the it's just a lot of laughter i mean i i even in the series particularly the more serious the subject, the more laughter there is, which is always kind of, it's nice because it takes the, it takes the edge off. But I mean, I can remember days of doing, um, scenes on the town where he, he just can't help himself. You need to do,

you do a, do a, do a scene and, scene and nail it, and you're like, cut. You go, okay, and you go, yep. Yeah, well, we have to move on. But yeah, it was pretty good. Then you kind of go, oh, do you want to do it again? It's not getting any better. I mean, it's just sort of this thing where it's just a constant taking the piss. The day goes faster.

But there's, I don't know, there's something about that that just makes it more fun. And I always feel like, you know, and actors who work with him, they get that with Ben. They get that with Ben. Because he's not going to leave until he sees you okay, which is something that you don't always get. He will not move on until you go, you okay? You good? Yeah.

You sure? To which the first time he ever said that to me, I said, boy, why are you asking me if I'm sure? Are you sure? He came up as an actor. And he cares. And he knows the agony of that thing of second guessing that sometimes actors can go through. But if somebody said to me, for the rest of your career,

you're only going to work with Ben Affleck, I would be more than happy with that. Yeah, that's cool. Is there a huge difference between that? I mean, you've done these huge movies like Transformers. I mean, that's got to be a whole different animal altogether. Yeah, because those things really become less about performance. I mean, you really use your imagination with those things so in that way

they're really fun but the but doing the Transformers film was the most physically taxing job I've ever had to do because you're just you're you're constantly running running or shooting or fighting it's what it's like to be Tom Cruise it It's like, yeah. Well, and he's the master of that. And it's very, very, very technical, those films, because you're reacting to things that aren't there. And once again, Michael Bay, very, very well-prepared guy. he he's he's got it all in there and yet he'll throw stuff out of left field sometimes he'll just the world is his muse he'll come up and say you know what we're gonna do it this way it seems counterintuitive to what you're trying

to do but he's very smart and he'll throw it up in the air. But I had fun. I had fun doing that film. I mean, I, you know, Michael is a, he's a yeller, man. He, he. Yeah, well, there's all these mythic stories. He gets loud. He gets loud and he, but he's also, you know, he's a taskmaster.

He wants it to be great. Michael never wants something to just be good. And I don't think any director worth their salt or actor or anyone just wants something to be good, serviceable. I mean, he wants it to be great and then and beyond great. And he puts, you know, an incredible amount of energy into that. And he expects everyone to do that. And sometimes people don't meet his expectations. And he's just not always very good or diplomatic in expressing his concerns or his dissatisfaction.

But I found him. I liked him very, very much and and we we worked really well together and he's also a guy who who will torment you and and break your balls but that right that kind of uh that kind of worked well um as a as a big comic book guy do you like would you like want to dip your toe in the whole Marvel universe? Yeah, I would. It's just, I mean, I did, I recurred on the show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which came out of doing this Marvel short,

which they put on the Blu-ray release of Avengers called Item 47. It was like these little short Easter egg films that they make. And now when you go to see a Marvel film, you know that you've got to hang out because there's at least one, if not two, Easter eggs. So you're solidified in the canon as that person yeah i mean look is it you know it was a it was a dream when i was a kid i just never you never thought that they were ever gonna make a spider-man movie and they weren't they weren't making those i mean when they finally made the the superman movie Reeve. I remember thinking, great, now the doors are going to open

and Marvel will start doing this. You had to wait until your 50s. Yeah. But I enjoy those films. I mean, I thoroughly enjoy it. They're really well crafted. And I feel like the whole Marvel universe, those characters, is very sophisticated.

Stan Lee had a kind of genius, you know, himself and all the people that he surrounded himself with and collaborated. You know, it's I look forward to them. People complain, they go, Oh, I don't want to see another superhero movie and I get it to a certain degree, but I'm okay with it because you know, it's, it's such an interesting thing. Like if you didn't know that about you, like you, you just don't strike me as because you know it's it's such an interesting thing like if you didn't know that about you like you just don't strike me as you know coming from this artist background and you

know serious painter father and all of that you know NYU David Mamet theater you're you don't I wouldn't I wouldn't presume that you would be like this comic book guy, but I know like how much of a fan you are. You know all my truths. Yeah, because you're a freak for sideshow. Yeah, I'm a total nerd. I'm a nerd. I mean, and I was when I was a kid. He just turns into a kid when he comes.

I know. I can't get rid of this guy who wants to come to sideshow every day. I know, they gotta give me a key card. Although, you know, that that that's my uh i don't know that i i've always been immersed in sort of pop culture but of course i you know growing up in the 60s that's when that pop culture kind of exploded everything became bigger and more colorful with the psychedelic art and And you had Peter Max and Roy Lichtenstein, and Marvel Comics kind of blew up.

And toys were kind of, you had Hot Wheels cars and G.I. Joes and Easy Bake Ovens and all this stuff. And there's a part of it that we just don't have any. It's like now we have phones. that we just don't have any. It's like now we have phones. When I was a kid, I had all that stuff. I had comics and stuff, but I had the little plastic soldiers and big chunks of modeling clay.

And you would just lose yourself for hours doing that stuff. And I just think it was just part of my life and it just never left to me it's sort of like comfort food to a certain to a certain degree and i i like and i uh you know when i saw sideshow i mean there's an and that was a when sideshow came around it was a game changer you know and they and initially and i was hip to them from when they came out publicly. And their first stuff was the World War I things and the General Custer and the Billy the Kid and all these kind of interesting. But it took that whole thing to a different level. I mean, Greg and I have had those conversations where I've said to him,

all these people who work not only at Sideshow and the different ways that they work there, whether they're sculptors or the box art people or photographers or the mold makers, the painters, these people are, they're all artists. Yeah, incredible artists. Incredible artists. People, if they wanted to,

be just working within the fine art world, but then I say, but then how can you really differentiate? What, because it's, you know, it's still art to me. Because it's pop culture. Yeah, but so people sort of tend to sort of poo-poo it. And we should say for people that are listening i don't know sideshow is a is a company um that's run by our mutual friend uh

collaborative partner in my case greg anzalone and they make very high-end limited edition runs of collectible figures from pop culture so So the Star Wars movies, Marvel Universe. Marvel, DC, and then their own stuff. And they do sculptures. They do one-sixth scale, 12-inch figures that have 33 points of articulation. And it's staffed by these artists, as you mentioned, who are incredibly skilled at painting in the greatest detail

or crafting costumes and sculptors people that if there was no sideshow you wonder well where would these people be able to do what they do like they've they have this home where they can go and do what they love and do it incredibly well in a supportive environment to create these things that people love. I mean, I didn't grow up with comic books and this is a new experience for me, like tapping into this subculture, but you go to Comic-Con and they have the second biggest booth on the floor

and people are freaking out and there's collectors all over the world. I mean, Guillermo del Toro has a whole room in his house filled with this stuff. His house is a museum. I'm sure you've probably collected a bunch of it as well. Oh no, I have a room. And it has a whole room in his house filled with this stuff. His house is a museum. I'm sure you've probably collected a bunch of it as well. Oh, no, I have a room. And it's a whole world.

It's easy for it to take over, but I have a room, which is sort of like we'll call it the screening room for, because I just man cave just, it's just a word that really bugs me. Man cave. That's like, I don't know, it's like the little rascals. What was it? The He-Man Girl Haters Club that Alfalfa had tacked on the treehouse. The toxic masculinity.

I don't even, yeah, I guess so. Maybe it's the toxic masculinity. But I have this room where my screen TV is in and where I go and watch movies and things like that. And it's just a series of shelves that are just filled with sideshow stuff. Yeah. And that's my sort of fortress of solitude. I can go in there and close the doors. And it's not like I'm getting up and posing these things all over the place. But a lot of them, because they relate directly to films that I love, there's this odd connection between looking at Iron Man in the movie and then looking over on the shelf.

And there it is. And there's that tactile experience of lifting up the visor and there's robert downey jr's face and the fingers are articulated and all that stuff i mean you know it's it's it's hard at times to sort of articulate that to people who who don't have any connection to it. They'll kind of, but eventually people sort of come around. That's nice to us. No, they think aesthetically. But then the other irony of that is that people will come to my house,

you know, for a dinner party or something. And everybody ends up down in the... Well, at some point, because it seems like a museum, both men and women will come in and go, wow, this is incredible. What are all these things? Or they'll say, oh, I remember that's from this movie or that movie.

And they get it. I mean, they do get it. Whether it's something they want to do themselves is a totally different thing. But they get it. There's a, I don't know, there's some sort of a connection. And I always say, you know, it's not hurting anybody. Yeah. What's the project that's still out there that your spirit's yearning to do?

Is there a movie you've always wanted to make or a character you've always wanted to play? Well, I started to. I wrote a television pilot for myself several, two television pilots for myself a couple years ago. And I was kind of disenfranchised with the whole business. And I thought, you know, I got to create something that I can really connect to. And interestingly enough, just as I was getting ready to go out to the pitch phase with my manager to start to do that, is when Bosch landed on my desk. But I started writing a screenplay with my oldest son, Eamon, last summer. And I've got a lot of stories.

I have a lot of stories. The TV pilots, they're good. I'd like to, but I may be, for one, I think I might be a tad old for it now, which is okay. And I'm hoping that Bosch will run for many, many years because it's such a character. It's a character that i love playing you know and he's you know even in his 60s in the books and the whole chronology of the books he's

in his 60s and he's he's still working as like a volunteer cold case detective a lot of legs left on this thing you know he's he's not going anywhere um so i i guess what I'd like to ultimately do is to start to direct and or act in films that I write, um, and do them with my friends and do them with my family. Because I think there's, um, those have always been kind of dreams of mine that, uh, and they don't need to be gigantic films, but that's always been, and I've experienced that working with Ben and with Lawrence Fishburne. When you work with a, and now so with, with Bosch, when you work with a group of people that are, you know, family and friends, you get a lot more done.

And I think you get the best stuff done when you're working with a group of people where there's mutual respect and trust and you don't feel necessarily like you're a hired gun. And I know that it probably sounds Marxist to a certain degree, but it's worked for me. When I've had those experiences, I've always thought I'd really like to recreate this

at another point and have a little bit more control over it. Do you look back on your career and wonder how it all came to be, or does it feel like, yeah, i'm supposed to be here doing what i'm supposed to be doing yeah i felt that i mean there have been times when i've thought particularly in the dry times and the lean times and the hard times you know i can remember early on kind of thinking to myself i'm i'm either either this is a great decision or I'm the most irresponsible person on the planet.

And the pursuit of being an artist in whatever discipline of art, by society's estimation, it is irresponsible. It's always that thing we hear people say, what are you going to fall back on? Right. It is kind of an outlaw way to live your life. I'm okay with that. I'm okay because to me, I remember at one point when I had kind of a bumpy semester when I was at NYU. I had kind of a bumpy semester when I was at NYU. I think I was, you know, I had a girlfriend that was in another city,

and I was, you know, not going to class and going to see her. And my father was agitated with me and kind of brought it up and said, hey, I just got your midterm grades, you know, and you're kind of floundering here and there. And it's time for, you got to go back to inward bound. Well, I thought, yeah, this is round two, right? Yeah. Although at that point I was old enough to say, well, I'm, you know, I of this stuff. I mean, if you're not, and I don't think that you need a college education in order to achieve success. But if you're not going to see this through, then don't waste time. Don't waste money.

And I realized that, because he said to me, all art's a little long and a little boring. And that really resonated with me, because it was at a time when I was kind of going, eh, I don't know. I don't know. Is this what it's? Because there's so much of that in the beginning.

There's so much desperation. There's so much pressure. And you see not only yourself, but other people so focused sometimes on entirely the wrong things. They're talking about the social aspect. Well, if I can get invited to some of these parties, I could go and move and shake. Or, oh, I met this producer.

I'm here to tell you that that's bullshit. It's empty. I've never been. I've been at many, many parties with famous directors and studio heads and producers that could, you know, they don't walk up to you at a party and say, you need to be the star in my next picture, kid. Yeah.

It's just. I was just having that conversation with my eldest boy the other night at dinner. It was his birthday. He's a musician. He's trying to make his way. And he's a very grounded guy. But I was relating that same thing. There's this sense when you come to LA or whether it's New York and you're trying to pursue this career in the entertainment business that you got to be at all these parties or if you're at the right bar or whatever, you're going to meet that person.

It's like the people that are successful are going to bed early and they're fucking working. Hard. They're grinding for a long time and ultimately the cream rises to the top. And those are the people that become employed and make their way. Yeah. No, look, it's not for everyone.

It's certainly not for the faint of heart. That thing I can remember being in a friend's house or something, and they had a very different environment in which they grew up, and the parents would say, so Titus, what are you going to do if this doesn't work out? And it never occurred to me that it wasn't going to work out, and that's not because I was arrogant. I just knew that this was the only thing that I really wanted to do.

Yeah, for somebody like you, there's value in not having a plan B. Well, my- If you have the constitution. But I grew up with parents who that was the same thing. My parents never had a plan B. And people thought that my father was crazy. And with my mother, she was very, very gifted. She ended up getting a teaching gig very, very early on, but then also kind of realized that her focus was being sort of watered down a bit because she had the security of having a fairly regular daily job, which she could depend on. And she said, I started to, she said, I got soft. She said,

I got soft and I kind of lost my way for a minute because I was comfortable. I felt safe. And that's what my parents did. And she said, and then I got a job. I got a job being as a fashion illustrator. And she said, I stopped teaching. And I get that. So for you, the job becomes, how do you not get soft? I mean, because you have predictable employment playing the same character for not just the foreseeable future, but perhaps for a very long time. And it would be very easy for you to just kind of settle into that, show up and check the box. As an artist, how do you maintain that tension to keep pushing the envelope and testing yourself?

Well, A, you do other stuff, right, which keeps it fresh. But also, I mean, one of the considerations that I had when I thought I wanted to go and do a series, as this was approaching, my late wife was very, very ill. And it became clear that she was going to die. um it it became clear that she was going to die and here and i i realized that what i probably was going to have to do was to try to find a television series something that would be grounded stability keep me home and they would have some stability but of course there's no guarantees in those things so i was working on this thing for myself and it had legs and i thought okay i can do that

um but there there is always there was always a sort of a hesitation to a certain degree even when i desperately needed money and to survive to do the regular uh jumping through hoops of pilot season. You'd read something and you'd kind of go, yeah, I'll do that. Well, you got to move to Vancouver. Oh, really? Well, maybe not. But you need to make, and I had three kids I had to take care of. And a sick wife.

And I had three kids I had to take care of and a sick wife. But when, so when Bosch came along, it became that thing of sort of, I would start to, right before that, I was looking at pilot scripts. And in the process of working in this business, particularly when you're kind of a hired gun and you're out and you're kind of working here and you're going to do that show. And that I observed a lot of times people who had been in shows that had been either running for a long time or maybe not only running for a couple of seasons, but I saw an environment in which people were not happy. And I think that happens sometimes.

People sign up to do something because it looks good on paper. And I just knew myself well enough that if I was going to sign on to do a series, it had to be a character, which is one of the reasons that was the impetus for writing my own thing, is that I would need to have a character that was going to offer me some sort of intellectual artistic sustenance that would carry me through so that I wouldn't be that guy who would show up on the set not really happy with what the characters the writers are doing with my character and and being a prick and kind of punishing everyone for getting this

opportunity or being on a on a set where the two leads of the show don't speak to each other or they don't they they fight with the with the writers and you know and i just thought i don't you know it's it's hard enough to be to for that grind of a of a television series in you know number one but if it's if you're knocking heads with people all the time, horrible. And I looked at, and I remember Michael Connelly, we were shooting the pilot and Connelly said to me, let me ask you a question. Did he write the pilot?

He was one of the writers on the pilot with Eric Overmeyer, but they worked very closely together. And Mike said, how long, how long would, do you think you'd want to play this character for? And the honest answer was, I'll play this guy as long as he'll have me. Because Bosch is the kind of character, you're lucky if one character like that comes along in your career. I've had lots of characters that I've thoroughly, I've been very lucky that way.

There have been very, very few jobs where I've kind of gone, oh, Jesus, this again, I don't really want to, but okay, because I got a mortgage and car payments and private school to pay for. It's just, he, the interesting thing about Harry Bosch is that he, as a, as a person doesn't necessarily evolve. His evolution comes out of circumstances around him.

Yeah. And so it's, it's incremental, the progression of this character, but at its core, I liked it. I really liked this guy. Now I really liked Jimmy O'Fallon as well.

He was a fun character to play. I mean, his moral compass was so magnetized that he couldn't find his ass with a map. But there was an energy and a kind of a pulse and a movement of that character that Kurt had created that made it very fun to play. And so that's the short answer or the long answer about playing a character on a series. If it's really well realized, I think if you get to a point where they run out of gas, which wouldn't happen with a character like Bosh. But I've seen other shows, either they come out of the box and they have tremendous success and it's explosive.

Then you've got to stretch it. And then you get into season four and all of a sudden you can see them losing their way. Or they lose their way a little bit and there's some criticism there and then the next season you watch it and it bears no resemblance to the show that you fell in love with because you go oh they're on the hamster wheel so they're there's more explosions you know and and aliens aliens and ass and you know what have you and gunplay. And that's not to say that those things don't have value. I always say, well, all art, yes, all art is subjective,

but all art is not necessarily subjective because there's good art and there's bad art. not necessarily subjective because there's there's good art and there's bad art um but the one thing i'll always remember something that my dad said was bear in mind though good art and bad art it takes an equal amount of energy to make bad art as it does to make good art so in that regard it is subjective um but uh i think it i think it just has to do with as long as there is there has to be something there that is moving you because it is easy i would say you know look and i i've just been recurring on Law & Order Special Victims Unit. And Mariska is an old friend of mine. And they're in their 19th season, moving into their 20th season. How does she stay energized for that?

Because the scripts are good. And the character is interesting. And they find ways to move that character periodically out of the comfort zone. Well, she's become an advocate for women as a result of the position that that role has placed her in. Yeah. Yeah. And that's – and she would be the first to say, as long as they keep it interesting. You don't have to – they don't have to they don't

have to put on a rocket ship you know um or or cure world hunger to make that character interesting sometimes you but it is as formulaic as a show is going to be i mean they hit their certain beats it's almost like it's soothing because when you watch it because you just know you kind of know how it's going to unfold right it's comfort food yeah exactly but it's also no harm no foul right i mean i love um you know stranger things i people either really respond to that show or they kind of go i don't get what everybody's now that show for me is pure crack i I love every aspect of that show. I love the performances, the writing, the cinematography, the music, the whole concept of the show to me.

Now, does that tickle that collector, pop culture, comic book nerd itch that I have? Yeah. But I also think it has above the value of entertainment. It has value and to me, it's art. Yeah, there's huge artistic merit in that show.

Absolutely. But I can also watch something like Fixer Upper, which is kind of banal to a certain degree, but I'm entertained by it. But I can't. I can't watch The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or The Kardashians because I'm physically. Soul killing. It's soul killing. Yeah., I'm physically. Soul killing.

It's soul killing. Yeah. And I'm physically allergic to that stuff. It makes me ill. And, you know, there are, I'm pretty permissive as a parent, what I'll allow. I mean, I try to, particularly with my daughter, to not expose her to things or, you know,

themes that might be a little bit too sophisticated for her age. But the one thing that I'll put my foot down is that I don't want her watching that shit. And I've said to her, it's bad for your soul. You know, and if an adult wants to make that choice to watch that, you know, that's, I don't, I just, watch that, I don't want her watching that stuff because that's not – and not everything needs to be inspirational. It's not that. I just – I don't know. I'm with you.

It offends me. It hurts my – like you said, it's soul crushing. I want to be respectful of your time. We've been going a long time and I want to let you go soon. But there's two more things I want to talk to you about if you will indulge me. And the first thing is you've mentioned gratitude a couple of times. Yeah. You've mentioned gratitude a couple times. Yeah.

So I gather that this practice of gratitude is a central aspect of how you kind of navigate your life. Well, I was raised that way because both of my parents grew up. My mother, I think, was a little bit more upper middle or middle class. My father grew up really poor, really, really, really poor. And there was a constant reminder to have gratitude for things that we have because there were so many people who didn't have things. I remember the first time my father took us as a family to the yucatan and i had never seen poverty like that before i mean i certainly growing up in new york and philadelphia and stuff you saw slums but

But I can remember going through a little village and being stunned. And my dad was also one of those guys who would grab a copy of National Geographic when you didn't want to eat cauliflower and show you children with rice belly and exposed ribs. show you children with rice belly and exposed ribs. But that's because he grew up with, I mean, they hunted and trapped and made their own food and grew their own food. So my parents were always very, very big on gratitude. And I realize that it's something that's always kind of served me well, because I think it's very easy with things being so readily available to us that we take a lot of that stuff for granted. But gratitude is, I just think it's it's integral to having you know to everything to make you a a a sort of fully well realized human being i mean i i'm look i'm

flawed i mean i i i'm a deeply flawed human being and have had my struggles in many different areas in my adult life. But I've also found that the parallel to that a lot of times was when I got myself into a dark place or into a place of trouble was that I had on some level disconnected a bit from being grateful. Well, you seem like a pretty, I mean, I know you well enough to know that you're a pretty grounded dude. You could be walking around like an entitled prick

and there's plenty of people in this town that do that. But I've seen you with your family entitled prick, you know, and there's plenty of people in this town that do that. But, you know, I've seen you, you know, with your family and you just seem like you exude that gratitude. And, you know, I think a byproduct of that is, you know, a level of humility that I would have to believe, you know, has been a bit of an engine in perpetuating this, you know, the longevity of the career that you've enjoyed? Well, I think you have to look. You have to have self-confidence. And particularly in the art world, right? You have to have self-confidence and almost maybe up to the edge, you know, of arrogance. Because if you don't have that strength, if you don't have that belief

and that drive, then what is the thing that fuels that? But when you also, when you live in the real world and you are subjected to endless amounts of rejection and until you kind of arrive at the place of understanding that it's not personal it's it's debilitating you know it's really debilitating so how do you how do you square that with yourself and i think a lot of that is that it's those it's the pause, moments of reflection where you can kind of go like, OK, this is overwhelming. I haven't booked a gig in three months, and my bank account is almost dry. And I don't know if it's the laws of attraction,

but I just know that when you're in a positive place and you're expressing gratitude those things tend to i i don't know i mean you know i'm not void gets filled i'm not einstein you know i can't i wish i could solve the problems of the of the cosmos but there's i just feel that that gratitude and humility are things that, that attract opportunity and, and success. And the important thing is that once you obtain those things, that you also have a healthy respect of them, but put them in a place where they belong. Because

I have seen people who've achieved tremendous success, and they bear no resemblance to the person that I knew prior to that success. And I find that heartbreaking, because part of that is, yeah, you have to have the humility. Because if you get to a place of success and people are whispering in both ears about, you can have anything you want, da-da-da-da-da-da-da, the rules don't apply to you, the basic fundamentals of decency and kindness, those are the things that really bother me when I see an actor or, air quote here, celebrity being rude or acting entitled. It infuriates me, particularly when they're not talented. Because then I want to say, boy, you should be exercising the highest levels of- Double time on the gratitude. Double time on the gratitude. Double time on the gratitude because you're just lucky.

You're just lucky. And I just feel that that's, you know, it's really the fuel. It's the fuel of success comes from awareness awareness not just self-awareness but awareness of the people around you you have to be an empath in order to kind of and it's and it's hard because yeah you know we do we get kind of hammered down with all the stuff that we're dealing with with paying our bills and and our health and and uh so it's it's very easy to become sort of dislodged by that and sort of thrown into the place of just circling the drain of going, what, what, when, when, when?

And typically, it's sort of like on social media, a lot of times on Facebook where you'll see people vent about, A lot of times on Facebook where you'll see people vent and or post about every single trespass. Yeah. Or, you know, today I was at Starbucks and the barista was rude. And then the next day they go, yeah, I can't get an agent. You know, I worked in this business for 10 years, but I haven't had an agent for three years. I can't get an agent. I worked in this business for 10 years, but I haven't had an agent for three years. I can't get an agent. What's the industry is doing?

I always sort of go, you're a magnet for negativity. That just begets more of that, becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of victimhood and blame. Well, years ago when that when when that book in that video the power came out and everybody was making fun of it oh the secret you mean the secret yeah and then then the power which came afterwards um and i remember uh showing it to to my mother my mother went, okay, I'll read it. And she read it. And she said, you know, this is just the laws of attraction.

The laws of attraction have been around for a long time. You know, you can manifest these things. And she said, so it's not really a secret. But I remember being kind of taken aback by that. Like you thought you were going to impart this wisdom. I was going to drop something. Your mom's like, this is old news? Yeah, she kind of said, this is old news and a new wrapping.

She said, but it's not to discredit it because, she said, I really think that as a society, we gravitate towards the negative so easily. It's so much easier to complain about what we don't have than to express gratitude for what we do have. And that landed on me in a big way. And it's not cool to be earnest about positive things i know especially when you're trying to be a badass in new york yeah and that doesn't also that's the other thing that you know you can always you can kind of spot that in a 40 acre field you want to go what are you so mad about you know it's it's the same thing of people making comments where you know they'll say oh it must be nice and

you kind of go i'm sorry do i need to apologize to you for working my ass off well you you got x y and z social media is always good for one of those guys yeah you want to just say well you know what i happen to have the film strip of my life. So look at chapters 3, 6, 9, all the way through to 17, and you can see that journey. It's, I don't know, it becomes a sort of, it's like death. It's the price of admission. I mean, there are just certain attitudes and things that are productive and others that are, that are counterproductive. Yeah. Last thing I want to ask you about, which is

kind of the guiding principles for, for living a successful artist life, you know, somebody who's blazed this path for a long time, who grew up in that kind of environment, you know, for people that are listening, who, you know, are pursuing some kind of creative, you know, endeavor in their lives, like what are some of the, you know, guideposts along the way that have, you know, kept you true and that have kind of empowered you through the more difficult times? Well, it goes back to gratitude, but it also, it's self-reliance.

And I think within gratitude, if you, you have to find a place to be able to be with yourself and be and be happy with yourself even in the mistakes that we make but i i've always sort of repeated this particularly to young actors that to to achieve success and i mean you know at the end of the day what kind of success i mean what is it the success i mean do you want to do success? I mean, do you want to be famous? If you want to be famous, go do something and have your friends film it, and they can post it on YouTube.

Or be infamous, right? One has to define some level of success. I mean, we all have to make a living and pay our bills. So you'd say, OK, well, i want to be able to make a living but i think i always say do this because you love it because you have to do it because if if a person doesn't have to to be an actor if it's not the thing that you're thinking about, dreaming about when you wake up, then do something else. Find that thing that becomes your life force, that becomes your drive. It's not just because this whole idea of being goals or being goal-oriented work for certain things.

Being goal-oriented as an artist is a fool's errand. Well, there's so little that you can control. Because you can't control it, right? Now, if you're running and you're trying to beat a time or something like that, that's a whole different thing. It's a linear path. or something like that, that's a whole different thing. It's a linear path. But by the same token, you're cruising along and you step on a bad pebble and you turn your leg, now you're out of business for a while.

I think that it's important to be passionate. I'm sorry, passion is kind of overused. It's to be really focused and centered and truthful with yourself am i doing this because it's it's what i have to do because if it isn't then do something else because there's lots of other things to do and i think many times people fall into the into the arts for, a myriad of different reasons. They're the big fish in the small pond in the high school plays. And so, well, I'm going to be an actor.

But then they get out into a really big pond and they realize that there are many, many more people that are as talented, if not more talented, than they are. And that's not what should inform your decision. What should inform your decision is that commitment and that passion. And then the rest of it is your head down. It's the teeth of a gale. Because that's going to be the thing that at the end of the day it's going to move you past that place when it feels hopeless when you when you haven't worked or you can't get an agent so how do you facilitate that well then you get another job because you still have to pay your bills so you know doing things kind of willy-nilly

you have to have discipline and that way you do have-nilly, you have to have discipline. And that way, you do have to have a plan. You have to say, OK, if my rent is X and my cable bill and my gas is X, then I've got to have a job that's going to give me that and then enough money for a little walking around money to do whatever. Yeah, and the discipline to weather the obstacles. If you presume an even playing field between a couple different people that are all equally talented and equally passionate who are driven to do this, the obstacles are going to wear some of those people down. Oh, they do.

They're going to be out. They check out quickly. The person that will prevail is the one who can persistently continue to show up in the face of all of that negative feedback because they're driven by you know a power source that um is more powerful than that they can override that yeah i look i mean there were people that i went to nyu with that were staggeringly talented actors really good people that i respected and that inspired me and um there there is less than a handful of those people who actually have gone on to have successful careers. Hunter Thompson said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

And that's my mantra. Yeah, when it gets weird, you've got to be weirder. And because it's all the other stuff that comes along, the accoutrement, that's kind of fleeting at the end of it, unless you're a complete psychopath and a narcissist, right? Now, I'd be less than truthful to say when a person comes up to me on an airplane or on the street and says that they really enjoy a performance that makes me feel good, right? But I'm also, you're never going to find me standing in JFK with a Bosch hat. Waiting for somebody. And a Deadwood t-shirt, just kind of looking around like, anytime. Yeah. Actually, we should make that YouTube video. That would be good.

Just have people walk by. No one's paying attention to you. And you just go, boss. Yeah. Boss. No, it's because that at the end, it is. I always say sustenance, but that's what it feels like. When I come off of a long day of shooting, and yeah, am I tired?

Absolutely. And when we finish the season, I'm exhausted. But nothing. absolutely um and when we finish the season i'm exhausted but nothing when i wake up in the morning i'm in a good mood when i arrive on the set i have a smile on my face no matter what has happened because i know that i'm going to get to do what i love to do and there's it's a gift man there's nothing more fulfilling and and and that's when not only gratitude but tremendous joy right even even particularly when it's just and i and i always joke i mean this is this is my my way of kind of breaking it up with the crew when you know we're into our our 15th 16th hour on on you know Friday, which is now Saturday morning.

And there's just that kind of grumbling hubbub of people just exhausted. And I just say out of the blue, this show sucks. And that will always buy us another three or four hours because we all laugh, because at the end of the day, it doesn't suck. Yeah. Everybody knows that they're stoked to be part of this thing. We're all working, doing what we love to do, and we don't want to be doing anything else. We want to be doing that. And we all care for each other. We all respect each other. And what are we doing? We're entertaining.

We're entertaining. We're making art. What a cool way to make a living, to do that. And so, yeah, this show sucks, right? Well, I think that's a great place to put a pin in it. This show sucks. This show does not suck. When do you guys a great place to put a pin in it this show sucks this show does not suck when do you uh when do you start shooting again august 1st we'll go back in season six season five comes april 19th very excited for that to come out into the world i think it's uh not so the other

great thing about working with this group of people, despite the success, the critical success and all that of the show, no one has ever fell back and sort of rested on their laurels. I mean, each season, the effort to choose the right book, to take it to the next level, and to raise the bar for ourselves, because Connelly always says, we're only as good as the challenges that we present

for ourselves, which is true. And this season is gangbusters. I'm really proud of it. And for the people who, you know, the diehards who love the books and love the show, they'll be well rewarded for their patience. Cause I know it's a long wait. So that's April 19th?

April 19th. April 19th coming up, man. That's cool. I want to come to the set. Can I get a set visit? Anytime, anytime. And you get a hat and a t-shirt. I'll go to JFK and stand in the middle there.

And we got to get you running again, dude. Yeah, I know. You know? I know. All right, we'll make it happen. Right after my next cigarette. Yeah, cool. All right. Thank you, man. Yeah, I know. You know? I know. All right, we'll make it happen. Right after my next cigarette. Yeah, cool. All right. Thank you, man. Thank you. Super great to connect with you today.

I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, man. This was a lot of fun. Best of luck, man. Thank you, brother. Peace. Peace. Good man, that Titus. What an interesting dude, right? Great storyteller and just one of the greats working out there in Hollywood. For more on Titus, if you enjoyed this conversation, please check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com and let Titus know how this one landed for you. You can share your thoughts with him directly on Twitter. He is at Welliver underscore Titus and on Instagram at Titus Welliver official. If you're struggling with your diet, if you're really desiring to master your plate, but feel like you don't have the best skills in the kitchen or the time or the acumen to kind of figure all

this stuff out, I can't stress enough how much I know our Plant Power Meal Planner can help you. It is an extraordinary product we worked very hard to create that solves a very basic problem, how to make nutritious eating convenient, delicious, and affordable. When you sign up at meals.richroll.com, you'll get access to thousands of delicious, easy-to-prepare plant-based recipes that are completely customized to your personal preferences. With that, you get unlimited grocery lists. It all integrates with grocery delivery in most metropolitan areas. So everything you need to make the recipes magically arrives at your doorstep. And you get access to a team of incredible nutrition coaches at the ready to guide you seven days a week, all for just

$1.90 a week. That's literally a cup of coffee. So to learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the podcast, a couple of simple ways to do that. Just tell your friends about the show or your favorite episode. Share what you're experiencing on the podcast

on social media. Take a screen grab, tag me. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, on Google Podcasts. Leave a comment on our YouTube page. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts. And you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate.

I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for videoing and editing today's show. Blake Curtis also doing double duty in the audio engineering booth right now. He just gave me a thumbs up. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Allie Rogers for portraits.

DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships and theme music by Analema. Appreciate the love, you guys. See you back here next week with another great conversation with musician, motivational speaker, PMA incarnate, Toby Morse. He is the vocalist for a punk rock band called H2O. If you enjoyed my conversations with John Joseph and Travis Barker,

I think you're in for a treat with this one. Until then, be well, go out there and be creative. Peace, plants, namaste. Thank you.