Titus Welliver On Gratitude & Great Art

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:24Rich Roll?

  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

• 3:09Rich Roll?

  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.

• 3:32Rich Roll?

  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 talent. 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

• 4:11Rich Roll?

  by a community of 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...

• 4:26Rich Roll?

  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 Bocchko, Michael Connolly, 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.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 5:02Rich Roll?

  I've wanted 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.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:12Rich Roll?

  Not that we're hanging out all the time, but you pop in from time to time.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Well, we have a lot of, we have a lot of mutual friends and mutual, you know, we're both on this planet, so.

• 5:24Rich Roll?

  That's right. We are on this spinning blue globe together. We're all in it together, man.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  We are, we are.

• 5:30Rich Roll?

  And it's just been so cool to see, you know, this, 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.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  They do, they-

• 5:59Rich Roll?

  It's crazy.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  They do their job. That's probably unsettling for a lot of people, too. Certainly, my enemies would find it unsettling.

• 6:04Rich Roll?

  Or your kids. Like, you know, everywhere I go, my dad is staring down at me.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, they don't, you know, and I make a conscious effort when, 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.

• 6:27Rich Roll?

  Stay away from Times Square.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:35Rich Roll?

  As if it was your idea.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:37Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  But you know, 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, of, you know, publicizing, getting the word out there.

• 6:48Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  About the show. So in that way, I'm, you know, I'm eternally, eternally grateful for that.

• 6:53Rich Roll?

  Well, you must have good relationships with cops these days.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:58Rich Roll?

  You know, customs agent, like anybody who's, you know, in sort of some form of law enforcement.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:03Rich Roll?

  You get a pass, you get pulled, have you been pulled over and?

• 7:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 7:07Rich Roll?

  Let out of a ticket?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  No, fortunately I haven't. And the, 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, and say hello.

• 7:18Rich Roll?

  Give a nod.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  You know, they're, and, um, 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.

• 7:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  And growing up had, had, um, friends who became cops and I've always kind of had that, uh, connection to, to law enforcement. Um, and, uh, they're very supportive of the show. And I think one of the, you know, long before we ever did the show, the, the books were extremely successful. And, and I think part of which speaks to that is, um, the fact that, um, particularly with the show, it's very grounded in reality. You know, I don't drive a Porsche and, and I don't have, you know, I'm not like James Bond jumping in and out of bed with all these, with different women and.

• 8:03Rich Roll?

  He got a cool house though.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  He's got a cool house. He has the, the, the very cool house. And of course that, that's sort of the great metaphor of being kind of the Eagles nest for a guy who is sort of.

• 8:14Rich Roll?

  Surveying the city.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Surveying the city and all that's good and bad in it. But cops like it because it's, it's no, it's no nonsense. And I've even said to cops, God, you know, this is what you do for a living. So I can't imagine that after a day of being, you know, a robbery, homicide detective, seeing the worst of the worst in the world that. You you you want to go home and and you know, and 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 and 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.

• 8:55Rich Roll?

  They're novels.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so that's just the the structure of the show, the narrative is much more like reading a novel. You know, each episode really serves more as a purpose of of being like a chapter in a book, you know, and 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 where as much as I want to want to get through it because it's so good, I really try to kind of savor sometimes.

• 9:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  I mean, Stranger Things was, for me, was so difficult because it was so engaging that I couldn't pull away from it.

• 9:41Rich Roll?

  Right. You want to just rip through it.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Want to 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.

• 9:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  And I'd feel kind of shamed, which of course, you know, speaks to many, many

• 9:55Rich Roll?

  Well, I feel I I I like that immersive experience.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  I do, too.

• 10:00Rich Roll?

  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.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do the same thing.

• 10:15Rich Roll?

  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.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I do. I I absolutely do that the same way. If it's a there are 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, that's

• 10:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Which is, I mean, you know, it's, we live in the society of, of serious attention deficit.

• 10:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  And impatience, but that's okay.

• 11:01Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, the unanimous consensus is that, you know, never has there been a character that fit an actor more like a glove than Hieronymus Bosch with you, you know, even so far as, you know, Stephen King, you know, 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 know, how do you approach that? Like, how did you figure out how to inhabit that person with that level of authenticity?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Well, there's, there's always the, the sort of background, um, you know, research cop stuff, how to get in and out of the car and weapons handling and.

• 11:44Rich Roll?

  Did you spend a ton of time, I mean, over your career, you probably spent.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  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, the, the humanity of him. I mean, you know, he's not, he's a real, he's a, he's an anti-hero, you know? He's a quintessential anti-hero. He's, he's flawed. Um, there's, there's a profound kind of sadness to the character. Um, there are definitely, uh, certain similarities in that way that made that character, uh, that I responded to him because I saw him as a, as a vulnerable, you know, a strong guy with a really good moral compass, but, but a person who's kind of broken to a certain degree. And I think that I identify with that because I'm, I'm broken to a certain

• 12:31Speaker 01

  degree. I, I sustained a lot of, uh, uh, you know, personal tragedy in my life. Um, and uh, so I understand that, you know, that, that loss and how, 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 bead on

• 12:58Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  who he is.

• 13:00Rich Roll?

  But I've heard you say that you, you know, you try not to bring yourself to a character because that's not acting, but inevitably, given, you know, we're going to talk about, you know, your, you know, your history and all of that, but, you know, your life experience informs how you're gonna, you know, inhabit this person.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Well, no, I, and I guess to clarify that, it's more of, um, as an actor, what I learned early on, when I was particularly studying the method at the Strasberg Institute, was that to use, um, experiences from my, 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, uh, memory. And then when I would try to act, I was so completely, um, detached from the character and, and so connected to my

• 14:01Speaker 01

  own personal pain, that I didn't feel like I was acting. And it felt, um, 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, um, you know, stepping out and taking certain risks. But then, again, I think risk in acting is a very, um, you know, misused, uh, word because it's acting, right? It's pretend. I mean, what is that? So if you're

• 14:29Rich Roll?

  The risk is in the vulnerability.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. But I think, you know, 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

• 14:41Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  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 certainly look different.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  And of course, I was young when I did that. I would, 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 sixty five pounds.

• 15:16Rich Roll?

  You could do it.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  For a part. Yeah, I could do it, but.

• 15:17Rich Roll?

  You're rocking the huge beard right now.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Well, that's my, that's all the, that's the weight I've gained. But I, I, I found that early on that, 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 something that I learned from him is the process, which he, he sort of, his technique, for lack of a better word, was kind of a bastardized version of the Sanford Meisner thing. And but within that, you, rather than taking something from your own personal life experience, you would create an, an as if scenario as it relates to the action

• 16:02Speaker 01

  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, you're doing a play or something, which is, you know, 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? And, and what I kind of realized was that, you know, to, to demonstrate emotion, certainly pain and anguish, didn't necessarily have to translate as tears.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Which, you know, 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 with across the table from another actor, and, and that, 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.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  It it sort of happens organically to a certain degree because you just kind of invest in that moment in these imaginary circumstances and they they kind of have their own life.

• 17:24Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  You still have you have control over it, but it that's just for me. I have many friends who are deeply steeped in in the method world and and they work that way and they navigate it really well.

• 17:37Rich Roll?

  It's gotta be exhausting, though.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  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 Bosch, 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 uh within circumstances of dealing with tragedy? Sure, but I, you know, I don't carry that necessarily home. It affects me in the moment when I'm I'm playing the scene, but I'm not I'm not dragging my feet when I come home because I've had to shoot a scene where I'm doing a, you know, a notification, a death notification to to a victim's family.

• 18:21Rich Roll?

  Right. Were you part of Mamet's theater company?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  I well, my all my classmates were.

• 18:27Rich Roll?

  Were they? Wow.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  I uh I don't know. I was always one of those guys that um wasn't big on clubs and things like that.

• 18:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  And I uh that whole thing was kind of birthed out of one of Mamet's um he had a great knack for throwing challenges out and because we were all sort of eager to please, um 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 I I might have been the only one who just sort of kept my hands on my lap because my thing was

• 19:05Speaker 01

  There were a couple of companies that came out of NYU. There was the Atlantic Theater Company with Mamet, 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 didn't, 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 just, I like to show up and, and do my thing and, and be, um, and not be a part of that.

• 19:41Rich Roll?

  Right. But what, I mean, 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.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Well, that, that completely. Um, it's not that I didn't have respect for writers before that, but it, it gave me, um, an opportunity and, and then the tools to really have, um, a different understanding of the process as an actor when you're interacting with the writing and how to, um, 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.

• 20:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Um, it, it, it really informed a lot about how I wanted to act and how I wanted to relate to writers and also the, the protection of, uh, 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, um, the, the, 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.

• 21:14Rich Roll?

  In terms of language or like inflection, like how you're embodying?

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Intention, yeah. Intention of, of, or, or how to, uh, to demonstrate, um, the writer's intention by kind of making it your own.

• 21:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  And I've had those moments and those are, those are really, um, Winning moments where I've been doing something with David and, you know, would complete a scene and, and, uh, and have David, you know, Milch say, you know, I, I didn't consider, you know, I didn't consider this and I didn't consider that. What made you think of that?

• 21:48Rich Roll?

  Personal victory.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  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 of these great writers. And of course, Michael Connelly being the center of it all. Um, any, any kind of Bosch 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, does this resonate? Does this seem like Bosch? Um, and he, you know, um, now that being said, I didn't feel like I needed to, to make gigantic

• 22:33Speaker 01

  changes to this character. Um, 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.

• 22:49Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  And Michael is, has always been, um, really receptive to that. And, and, uh, and there's no, uh, there's no ego. It's not ego driven in that way, you know? I mean, and I, 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.

• 23:10Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Um, 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, um, you know, and wear leisure suits and, uh, I don't know where that came from. Um,

• 23:26Rich Roll?

  But things you feel would be germane to something that, that Bosch would do.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the, and, and the Harry of the show is, you know, my, 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. Um,

• 23:47Speaker 01

  And I get to the point now where there'll be certain bits of dialogue that'll come across in scripts and, and I'll, I'll tweak it because to me it's, 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, it's coming out of his mouth.

• 24:10Rich Roll?

  This could go on forever. I mean, Connolly, you know, is so prolific. What, he's written like 32 novels or something? How many? There's like 20 Bosch books?

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Twenty, twenty, twenty-one, I believe, Bosch books.

• 24:20Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, you could

• 24:21Speaker 01

  And a new one coming out.

• 24:21Rich Roll?

  This could just be, you know, go on ad infinitum. I mean, you're going into season six, right?

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Season six.

• 24:28Rich Roll?

  When do you start shooting that?

• 24:30Speaker 01

  We start shooting that in August. But you know, Mike said recently, somebody asked him, and I don't remember where the, the question popped up, but asked him how, how long, how much longer, how many more Bosch books he'll write? Because now he's brought in this new character, this other detective, Renee Ballard, and, 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.

• 24:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  So it'll be interesting. I mean, look, if, if Mike stopped writing Bosch books tomorrow and we were going into season 20 or whatever, there, that character's so well established now that the writers, and they do anyway, you know, they are able to sort of, within the Bosch universe that's been created, they can, you know, they, they come up with ideas and stuff.

• 25:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's literally a franchise.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:23Rich Roll?

  You know, it's unbelievable.

• 25:32Rich Roll?

  What I'm interested in, I mean, 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, you know, my outside perspective, relate to filmmakers, writers, creators, with whom you've developed almost this mentor, you know? Relationship or co collaborator relationship, like whether it's Milch, you've done all of Ben Affleck's movies, now Connolly. Like, what is the distinguish, 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?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  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,

• 26:24Speaker 01

  you know, maybe on some level were, were 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 there.

• 26:37Rich Roll?

  You have to ask them.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  You'd have to ask them, what is it that, uh, that they see? I suppose part of it is, um, I'm really dedicated to, to, to what I do. And also, as for writers, I'm very dedicated to, to servicing the writing because I understand it. So it's not just about me showing up and, and learning my lines. I've never, 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.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  And I like to think it's because I have a modicum of intelligence and, and these people recognize also that I have a good work ethic. And, um, if anything, I, I strive to make things better. You know, I, I'm not a big believer in coming in and, and being pedestrian because that's my face on the screen and I don't want to half ass anything.

• 27:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, there's, there's talent, there's ability.

• 27:45Rich Roll?

  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.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and it's not to say that, um,

• 27:58Speaker 01

  That I've not, in working with those people, that I've not had disagreements about things.

• 28:04Rich Roll?

  But there's a, there's a foundation of respect.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  There's a foundation of respect and there's also a way to, it never has, it's never been a power struggle. It's always been a thing of, and I suppose there's, there's at times that I sort of present these things to them. And say, you know, right, wrong or indifferent, I have this idea. And that it's considered, you know what I mean, with respect. I mean, I, there, there were times or things with, with Milch where I, I would come up with something and Milch would say, you know, 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, despite the fact that I'm, I'm 57 years old,

• 28:47Speaker 01

  I feel like I'm, I'm in a constant state of, you know, evolution as, you know, as an artist. And so I, I always sort of, I never want to give myself a break. I, I want to be challenged and I want to, I want to get better at what I do. And, and the older I get, I, I think that I've figured some things out to a certain degree. I certainly know as an actor, what, what things work for me technique wise. And, you know, I'm not an actor who does multiple takes of things. I'm, I, I just, I can't work that way.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  I don't run up to something, I come in, I'm prepared. I, 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, I also like to see what's going to happen, you know, in the moment, in the room with another actor. So I, I don't.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  I never marry myself wholeheartedly to an idea. Because I I just find that that makes it kind of stagnant.

• 30:08Rich Roll?

  Do you do you like rehearsal? You seem like a guy who wants to who's more in favor of of being present to the magic.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I I mean, rehear- the rehearsal process, certainly in theater, is is absolutely necessary. Right? It's a whole different different animal. The the technical aspect of film and television is a is a very different way of working. And so I tend to with within film and television, I don't like to rehearse. 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 et cetera, et cetera, so that the.

• 30:55Rich Roll?

  You have to do it again.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, the direct the cinematographer has a sense and the and the director is saying, you know, then they can come back and go, oh, I really. You know, I I wasn't 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 I don't mind technical rehearsals. But I don't wanna I don't wanna sit down and and do a series of rehearsals before we shoot. Because I feel like that kind of that that bleeds the the authenticity out of it. And it makes people self conscious and then they they really start acting. And then it has a very, very different feel to it.

• 31:35Rich Roll?

  Or they get locked, they get a closed mindset, this is what I'm gonna do.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Right. And then you see them when when, you know, they'll do something in a in a master. And you can always tell, you know, within the master shot, they'll do this one particular thing. And I immediately I get clued in and I go, that's the red flag. They that's they they've got that. That's their thing for us. And you don't what you don't wanna do is.

• 31:57Rich Roll?

  Their acty thing.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Well, you don't wanna 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 to the other to the other actor. But also, you know, as as as a lead on a show and a producer 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. Cause I always say, hey, look, if you're gonna make a choice, make a choice that's gonna help tell the story because it's very easy to get, and look, when you're, I mean, when, when I was a young actor.

• 32:38Rich Roll?

  How can I draw the attention to myself?

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Oh, I was, I, I was all about business and, you know, I'm gonna eat peanuts here and I'm gonna drink the beer and I'm gonna smoke a cigarette and, you know, I'm gonna clean my gun and, you know, and what I realized as I got older was I didn't have to do all that shit. You know, I, it, uh, if it wasn't telling the story, it just was business. And so now I'm, I'm terrible. Like, you know, directors will come in and go, yeah, you know, might be, maybe you're making yourself a cup of coffee. And I'd say, what, I, you know, I, the character's already had his cup of coffee.

• 33:15Rich Roll?

  But there's a stillness to Bosch too, and the proximity of the camera, you know, lends itself to subtlety.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  And that's by design. I mean, when I read, when I read the script, um, one of the first things that I felt about that character was that he 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's sort of.

• 33:43Rich Roll?

  No, he doesn't give a shit what anyone thinks about.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:56Rich Roll?

  He's unapologetic about who he is.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  And I, and I, there's something kind of interesting and refreshing about someone who comes in. Um, because there are also times when he sticks his elbows out. Um, but.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  I felt a real, um, I felt that I gravitated towards the stillness of that character because really when you read the books and when, you know, he's, 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 Bosch, when you, you, you have the luxury of the, of the narrative of 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?

• 34:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, without, without the kind of noir trope of using a lot of voiceover.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  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, 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, uh, I, I treasure those moments because it, those moments really challenged me in that I've got to in some way, project some internal life and some, you know, inner

• 35:40Speaker 01

  emotional life with this character without, without dialogue.

• 35:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  And, uh,

• 35:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How do you manifest that in your physicality?

• 35:48Speaker 01

  And I think that, that comes through not only the relationship to being still, but also having, you know, two great cinematographers that know, um, you know, we, we now have been doing this going into six years. They know how I work. They know where, where and, 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. 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 that's

• 36:30Rich Roll?

  They read it. They're fans of the book, too. They can project, you're, you're, there's a, there's a blankness upon which they can project their idea of Bosch.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Right. Which is, you know,

• 36:40Rich Roll?

  And you have little secret, like you have little secrets too, or techniques. Like I've read or heard you say at some point, like when Harry doesn't like somebody, he, he looks at his, 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.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, there's a lot, you know, it's funny, too, because there's a lot of, there's, there's the Harry in the books and then, and, and my interpretation of that Harry in the books and then personality traits of, of, um, male figures who, who have, um, influenced me. My father, me, one of them, um, Warts and all, uh, and, uh, David Milch, uh, men who have had, uh, uh, who have had influence.

• 37:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Um, and I

• 37:30Rich Roll?

  Both like hard boiled guys.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Kind of no nonsense, um, hard, but, but also, uh, very sensitive and, and vulnerable men. I mean, there's a lot of, uh,

• 37:45Rich Roll?

  What's that weird combination of artist sensibility with like traditional kind of values about hard work and, and not taking any shit from anybody.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Right. And I think also that's what makes him, what, what, what makes Harry good at his job is that he's not a guy who would ever bend the rules and, uh, Certainly ethically, he's not gonna beat a confession out of, out of a suspect and he's not gonna plant evidence on someone to gain a conviction.

• 38:16Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  You know, there's that kind of dogged pursuit of justice and he really is that guy who, who is the advocate for the victim and for the victim's family and he, there's a, there was a great line and, and we've repeated it since then where people have, you know, referenced closure and Bosch says closure is a myth, you know, because that's, and that's true.

• 38:39Rich Roll?

  Well, that was the arc of the season of solving, you know, your wife's murder, right?

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:45Rich Roll?

  That he arrives at that place of solving it to realize that the closure didn't carry the meaning that he was searching for.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  And, and, and also the, you know, finally figuring out who it was that, that, that killed his mother, that, that it was empty ultimately.

• 38:59Rich Roll?

  Right, his mother, that's what I meant.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  And that he couldn't, that he couldn't really reconcile that.

• 39:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  I mean, there's a part of him that's sort of, is able to, to close that chapter, you know, in his, in his history, but, but the damage and, and the pain is, is something that, you know, he'll, you know, I don't think that people ever can outlive that, that pain, you know?

• 39:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  To, to assuage their, their pain, you can't. You just, 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, 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, uh, you know, that's, um,

• 40:13Speaker 01

  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, there is a world weariness with Harry. And what we've been able to do is that through his relationship with his daughter.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  And those are scenes that I probably treasure the most of all the scenes that I do on that show is working with Madison Lince. I mean, A, I'm a father, I understand, but I'm also not Harry Bosch. So I, I have, I have been in my children's lives, right? 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, he doesn't have any skills, you know?

• 40:57Rich Roll?

  But it softens him.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  It doesn't. I think it's made him.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  It's, it, for the first time in, in his life, I think you see a guy who's, who's allowing himself to trust happiness a little bit. And because that's the one thing that I, 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 can, I, I connect and understand that thing of not trusting happiness. When you, when you are dealt a body blow like that.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  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 for, uh, his, his way of pursuing justice for victims. And, and I guess, yeah, softened him a bit. And yet by the same token, there's this, there's an internal kind of terror that exists inside of him.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  In, in caring for his daughter, he wants to, he wants to protect her from, from all this stuff. In the world, he's trying to imbue her with some. Sense of awareness and sometime to the point where it's smothering for her and she's kind of saying, hey, hey.

• 42:27Rich Roll?

  Pushing back.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  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, while he's, he's happy to see her, her development, he's also repelled by it. It scares him.

• 42:49Rich Roll?

  Because he sees the path laid forward for her in a way that's too close to his own.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:57Rich Roll?

  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 Connolly'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, you know, a couple of decades.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:20Rich Roll?

  Cause you know, we're out here in Calabasas.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:23Rich Roll?

  You know, I lived on the, 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, um, you know, uh, 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.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:53Rich Roll?

  Uh, 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 a week in downtown now. I'm running around MacArthur Park, I'm in Boyle Heights, I'm, you know, meeting a friend at, at a wood paneled restaurant with, you know, red leather, you know, 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,

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:26Rich Roll?

  meet his buddies for a drink.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 44:28Rich Roll?

  That LA exists and Los Angeles is very strange in that your lifestyle is defined by the neighborhood, you know, the, the five mile radius in which you live. And there's a whole other world going on, you know, just a couple of miles away.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:43Rich Roll?

  This very different place with people who are inhabiting lives that resemble the lives portrayed on the show.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, we're there. I mean, you know, that's the thing. The, you know, Harry Bosch land, he works Hollywood homicide. So that's where he is. He's downtown. He's in Boyle Heights. He's in all these, these places. And then you have Hollywood. And of course, you know, it's the great sort of metaphors. It is. It's the boulevard of broken dreams. You know, 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, with, you know, hopes of fame and fortune and, and the endless tales of people who come out and then just kind of disappear. Right.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  When it doesn't happen, they disappear. They go down these bad roads and there, there are all these nefarious characters who, who prey on these people. And, uh, and that's sort of the, you know, that's the thing. It's the facade. It's like going to a back lot on, on Warner Brothers or Universal and you see, you know, you're in, you're in Europe, you know, and Universal, you go, oh my God, you know, these cobblestone streets. And then you, you know, you walk around and there's, you know, four by sixes and things that are propping up these, these, uh, these facades. And there, and there's a lot of that here because there's so much, um, it's so enticing in that way to a certain degree to people. They look at it and it's, oh, everybody's,

• 46:12Speaker 01

  everybody's rich and everybody's famous and no, they're not, you know? And then you, you know, you walk down Hollywa- Hollywood Boulevard, you know, uh, after eight o'clock at night or, 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, you know, people refer to the zombie apocalypse and I say, these aren't, these aren't zombies. These are people that have, that have been discarded by society that through, that, that are either mentally ill or they've been, or have lost their jobs and, um, or have, uh, uh, you know, chemical dependency issues and things like that, or, you know, nobody, and, uh,

• 46:59Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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, you know, downtown has found a way to thrive.

• 47:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  You know, it's there. I have lots of friends who spend time there. I, you know, and go and eat in restaurants down there. I've never really had a connection there until, until I was shooting down there all the time. And it's, you know, it saddens me, but it's sort of like the, the more they try to slap a coat of paint on it, it feels to me that it sort of exacerbates.

• 47:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think it just foments the problem.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:01Rich Roll?

  You know, I've had some interesting experiences because I live, you know, 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 wanna, you know, I wanna 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.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  No, I don't either.

• 48:27Rich Roll?

  You know, to, to, you know, an observant's eye, it looks dangerous. It's just, I mean, for people that don't know, it's literally a tent city that goes on for like, you know, it's a square mile.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  It looks like Bangladesh, you know?

• 48:39Rich Roll?

  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.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 48:53Rich Roll?

  Around here.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:55Rich Roll?

  And there's a sense of community and connectivity that those people have, you know, amidst this tremendous despair, you know, this impoverished state in which they live. And it's, it's a horrific sight. And yet there's an inescapable like heart and humanity to it.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's, you know, it, it's a part of the ugly reality, right? That, that we look around and we see people, um, 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 the, 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, I, we shoot down there a lot, so I've had a lot of interaction with, with people there

• 49:52Speaker 01

  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, um, you know, there's always extra food brought along, cases of water and things like that. I mean, these are small gestures.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  We can't go in and, and, and solve the, the, uh, the ills of, of society. But I've, I've had a lot of interaction with people and they're very funny because they've, a lot of these people have seen me in, in films and, and television shows and things. And, um, one of the first times we went down to the, to the bins, where homeless people put their things in these storage bins and we were shooting there. Um, the idea that I was interacting with them, several of them were kind of vexed by it. Well, why, you know, you're a big star. And I say, well, first of all, I'm not a big star. I'm, I'm a working actor, but you know, but you're talking to people.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  And I say, but, but you know, 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 and they'll come down and hey, how you doing? And da, da, da, da, and interacting and, uh, and yeah, I don't feel unsafe when I'm down there. I, I feel quite the opposite. I feel like it's, it's people just trying to live, you know? Live in, in really harsh circumstances, but, but just trying to, to live with some dignity.

• 52:00Rich Roll?

  I, uh, I don't know what the solution is, but whatever we're doing right now is not working.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  No, it's not working. It's, it's not working at all. And, and, and, you know, in a barge out into the middle of the ocean, which we always sort of joked, that's what happened to New York. I mean, I, 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, where are all the homeless people? Where are these people that? And you do, you know, particularly within a neighborhood scenario, you sort of forge these relationships, particularly with a lot of the people that would, that would, in New York, that were mentally ill. Yet, when they were treated-

• 52:38Rich Roll?

  Neighborhood takes care of them.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Neighborhood takes care of them, you know, and also says, hey, you know, please don't, don't pee on the doorstep.

• 52:45Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  You know, um, I, I just always think of my mother who would, um, you know, our leftover food never went into the fridge, the refrigerator. My mother would put it into baggies and things and she would, uh, you know, it always made me nervous, but 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 plate where it would, you know, and it would say, this is good food. And I was raised that way, that, that you extended yourself. Um, and, uh,

• 53:19Speaker 01

  A lot of times, particularly, you know, people who weren't from my neighborhood, when 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'd say, "He doesn't mean any harm." He just, 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 threatened by him. I can tell when he's, if he's just come out of a long stay, you know, at Bellevue, because he's, you know, his clothes are, you know, he's slightly less disheveled. He looks cleaner and he's got a baseline, because he's, but I say, you know, then within a couple of weeks, he's gonna be shouting at people on the street because he's not getting his medications and things like that.

• 54:04Rich Roll?

  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, you know?

• 54:27Rich Roll?

  But let's take it back to your background. I mean, you had an incredibly interesting, eclectic childhood raised by two artists.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, I guess you would say it was somewhat rarefied, although to me it was normal because all the kids that, you know, 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, you know, 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."

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Maybe, you know, and then sort of, that became kind of difficult for them to wrap their minds around it. And I think in that, you know, people say, "Well..."

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Obviously, you were, you were, you were sort of, 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, you imitate to a certain degree that, which you see in your environment. But my parents never pushed.

• 56:00Rich Roll?

  Foisted it on you.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Never, never whatsoever.

• 56:02Rich Roll?

  Your dad, your mom was a fashion illustrator.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:05Rich Roll?

  And your dad was a very successful landscape painter. His work is like, he's been everywhere, like the Met, the MoMA, you know, 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.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and I, I think, you know, full disclosure, that was initially, the idea of that was sort of seeking my father's approval, you know, trying to find a common ground in which I could, I could relate to him. Because he was a very intense guy. I mean, he had an enormous capacity to love, but he was a, he was an intense, intense man. Someone of a rageaholic and not the most patient guy. I mean, those are, there are certain

• 57:04Speaker 01

  traits of his that have crept into my DNA and, and, you know, there, 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, I kind of fully immersed myself in that world with my dad and he was.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  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, in that way, you know, 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, you know, and, and be very critical of it. But I also, I signed up for that. Yeah. So by the time I was around fifteen, sixteen, I had, I'd kind of gone through this sort

• 58:17Speaker 01

  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, 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, they couldn't teach me anything. I'd already been taught all of the, the technical things that were important. And, 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 eye, my own voice, right? So after a kind of, you know,

• 59:02Speaker 01

  unproductive year at, at art school at Bennington College, in which I, you know, more, just kind of partied my head off. Uh huh. And I have great memories of, 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, Bret Easton Ellis went to Bennington? Yeah. Are you guys there at the same time? He was there, he was there after I was there. Right. And.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  And so I, I knew I was in trying to, my father was gonna 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, you know, what we're, what we're looking at academically for you is you just haven't shown up. I mean, there's, you know, you've, you've shown up to your painting classes and you've done some good paintings and you have, you have talent, but you're not, you know, I just didn't have any.

• 59:57Rich Roll?

  You didn't have the passion for it?

• 59:58Speaker 01

  I didn't have the discipline, really. I didn't have the self-discipline. And so my, my remedy for that was that I thought, well, this really comes down to a, to a self-discipline thing. I'm gonna join the Marine Corps. And I thought that would kind of straighten me out. And my father said, well, you, before you join the Marine Corps, you're, you gotta 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, I don't know if I can swear.

• 1:00:33Rich Roll?

  You could swear.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  But we, he, he referred to it as Camp Fuck-Up. And, and all my brothers and I attended Camp Fuck-Up. And what he, within that time, while I was sort of installed in a, in a little Cape guesthouse on my father's land up in Maine, I lived kind of like Thoreau. My, you know, it was no girlfriends, no hanging out, boxes and boxes of books, which my.

• 1:01:02Rich Roll?

  The agenda was some kind of academic curriculum?

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Rich Roll?

  Or what was the daily, you know?

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  So I lived, and, and then there was a, there was a plot of land that needed to be, that needed to be cleared, so that we could harvest it for firewood. He had a huge, huge, just a whack of land, several thousand acres. And.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  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, 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, I don't, 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. And, uh,

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Wow, man, this is intense. It was really intense. And it was sort of, you know, the, the, the book showed up and it started, you know, in Mesopotamia. And then it was like, you know, working through, you know, the complete works of Faulkner. And, uh, it was kind of all over the place. And, and, uh, uh, in Proust and, and it, it just was endless. And I would, I would come into his studio, he, 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, um, 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

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  be with my siblings or something. And the door would open, my father would say, come in the studio. Studio time. And we'd all kind of go like, oh, shit, man, no, this is not going to end well. Um, well, so I did that and it was painful at times, you know, I, I can remember, um, reading a book that was a tome and then sitting with my father in a studio for four hours. He, he's grilling you. Having the conversation and finishing it. And, and he said, yeah, you gotta read that again. And to, to which, and, you know, I, and I want to say, it wasn't War and Peace, but it was definitely dense, right? It was definitely, you know,

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  Russian literature, you know, and, and, uh, and I said, why do I have to read it again? And 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 toeing the line. I'm, 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

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:32Rich Roll?

  How long did that go on for?

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Oh, months. It was like almost a year. And, uh, and not, uh, but he said to me, what are you, what are you gonna do now? And I said, uh, we, we had many conversations and one of them, we, we talked about painting and, and, um, he said to me, when you're not thinking about girls and beer and, and smoking grass,

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  do you, 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.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  And he said, well, then that's what you should do because if it doesn't get you up in the morning and it's, if it's not on your mind, you need to do what's on your mind. And, and that, and that was really the first time I'd ever said that out loud. I'd never told, I mean, I did, I did theater in, in, in high school and things, but it was for me, it was, it was kind of fun.

• 1:05:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  But that's when I really, and he said, well, then you better, you know, you, you should go, go to New York.

• 1:05:38Rich Roll?

  I want to go to camp inward bound.

• 1:05:42Rich Roll?

  We, we might all be a little bit better off. We all did a little camp inward bound.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  You know, at the time I, I resented it and, and, uh, and it felt like a punishment many, many times. But the truth of the matter is of all the things that my father.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Gave me over, over, you know, while he was alive. That was the greatest gift.

• 1:06:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a beautiful gift.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  And, and I didn't, I wasn't able to see it until I was away from it and I was a little bit older, that I went, oh.

• 1:06:16Rich Roll?

  And just the extraction from society to isolate you, it's just you and him and books and nature, it is very thorough, you know, I'm sure you had to, it allowed you to develop that intuition to even answer that question, you know, like, what do you think about?

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Well, it did. It also, what it did was it made me realize, I, I, 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, there's less importance in, in certain social aspects. I mean, I'm very comfortable. I mean, I, I'm a social person. I like, I like being with people and meeting people, but I'm also fine by, by myself. I can, I, 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,

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  but I'm good being by myself. I don't have a, I don't have, and I, 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, it forced me to grow up, certainly emotionally, definitely intellectually. It kind of pulled, pulled me out of a, out of a, a level of kind of intellectual and emotional immaturity. I, I sort of, I, I grew up in that, in that time, I kind of grew up. Now that, you know, I, I've certainly regressed on, on, on many

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  an occasion, but I will say that that was, that was, in all the years that I was in, in school, I learned more in that time than I did.

• 1:08:10Rich Roll?

  I can't, yeah, I would imagine so. So you end up in New York after that?

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and not, 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.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  But it 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. Um, you know, at eighteen, I was living on the Upper West Side in a funky little apartment with my girlfriend and, you know, I wasn't, you know, we we eked by every month, but

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  uh, it was okay.

• 1:08:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  It was okay. And and I studied at the HB Studio in the beginning, the Herbert Burgoff Studio, because first of all, it was only

• 1:09:00Rich Roll?

  Austin Pendleton?

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  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, um, and Walt Wickover and and and Uta Hagen. It's some great teachers there.

• 1:09:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  Um, I didn't get to know Austin until many, many years later. He he produced a play that Lawrence Fishburne and I did together that Lawrence had written. We did it in in New York. But, um, you know, it was it was the real deal. I mean, it was it was intense. And then I sort of felt like I was missing something. And I wanted to decide, made the decision to go back to school, that I wanted to go back and continue my education. And so I, uh, applied to several schools and and then when I was accepted into schools, I had needed to make a decision. I chose to go to NYU and and I'm and that was the

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  best possible choice I could have made because that's where I connected with with Mamet and um, and lots of great actors and uh, and and saw it through, you know, and but it was important to me. I I felt like that which had

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Had been inspired by my time with, with, 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, and I love music. And so that was my return to, to go back.

• 1:10:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So, so bringing a level of like maturity to your education, and you said something really interesting, was that, you know, it was important to you, you know, you were doing it for yourself, not to impress your father.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  No, and that was the thing that was very liberating was that, that to arrive at that place and to have that clarity, you know, the realization that I was doing it for myself, because it's what I wanted to do, rather than seeking the approval of, of, of my parents, that was very liberating. And, uh, you know, it didn't, I mean, until practically up until the time my father died, you know, he was, it was always the subject of, you know, dinner conversation. At some point, the Bennington story had to, had to come out.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  My father, just on some perverse level, really enjoyed tormenting me about that.

• 1:11:34Rich Roll?

  Just twisting the knife with that. Why were your siblings in inward bound? Different versions of the same story?

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, similar things, just, you know, um, you know, he was a stern taskmaster. 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.

• 1:11:59Rich Roll?

  Right. But you had this base skillset. 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, you know, a very disciplined man, from what I gather, who valued hard work and, you know, didn't take shit and didn't suffer fools. And, you know, 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, you know, how you approach these roles.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  Well, I learned that. And I think that was the thing. My father came from a, you know, a staggeringly poor. Background and 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 you know, it was a little town. I mean, people didn't, people didn't go become painters there. And so, you know, from the time he was a little kid, he had incredible responsibilities, which of course, you know, it always falls into that category of, you know, walking to school in three feet of snow, 12 miles uphill and things like that.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  But the stories were true, you know, and, and to a certain degree, I think they, they weren't necessarily cautionary tales, but we really had 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, I can remember him paying off a neighbor's mortgage on their farm. And, 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.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  He was like a hired hand and he worked at my dad's place in Maine. 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, on the house. And my father got in the car and went, went down there and, and he pulled out his checkbook and wrote a check for, I think to the tune of, at that time was 15, $20,000.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  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, I'm coming to the bank. I'm closing all of my accounts.

• 1:14:52Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  And he had been banking there forever. And, uh, and you know, 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, that they would bully a farmer who could barely, you know, scrape it together.

• 1:15:20Rich Roll?

  So this incredibly principled man, you know, that raised you. I mean, how does this inform how you raise your kids? I mean, your dad has three kids. We live in a very different culture than that. Um, you know, obviously there's so much value in so many of those things that he taught you. Um, 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?

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  Well, my, you know, my, my kids have a very privileged life, but they also, um, you know, they've, they've been around the world enough to, to see people who have nothing. I may, I think that what I've, what I have done, what I, what I have strived to do with my kids is to teach them gratitude and to, and kindness. And that, uh, and I see that in them. They have great empathy.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  They're kind. They're not angels. I can tell you that. They are disciplined to a certain degree, but they're also, you know, 13, 17, and almost 20. So they're very normal in that way.

• 1:16:48Rich Roll?

  Except they're all on your TV show.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  They're all, yeah.

• 1:16:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Aiman plays your son.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  That's Quinn.

• 1:16:55Rich Roll?

  I mean, your younger, Quinn plays your younger, your younger, young.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  He plays the younger Harry Bosch.

• 1:17:01Rich Roll?

  Right, okay.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  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 gonna play in some of these flashbacks. They had, they had met my kids. Aiman was slightly older at the time. And they asked, they said, you know, does your, does your son Quinn, you know, he looks so much like you, would, you know, we want to, 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've only, you know, I was the teddy bear in the Christmas play,

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  etc., etc. And, and he ended up doing it. And, 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, she'll push her in the swing, because the father is completely glued to his cellphone. And, and Michael had written that scene. He said, you know, it'd be great to, Cora could do this. Would she want to do it? So there's that. Now, that being said.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  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. They're both really, really good actors. And I certainly never, you know, 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. They're both musicians, they they play a lot of music. So who knows what they'll ultimately end up doing my. And my daughter, she's she's 13, I mean.

• 1:19:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you never know that.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  She's really interested in in in being an actor. But she's also very interested in her iPhone, too. So that becomes the, you know. Thankfully, we didn't. 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's the six o'clock news. We didn't even have a color TV, I don't think, until I was in high school.

• 1:19:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there there is an important relationship between boredom and creativity.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:46Rich Roll?

  That we're losing our connection with. That that scares me, you know, I have, you know, an 11 and a 15 year old daughter. And yeah, they love their iPhone, you know, and I it's problematic.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is, particularly when you try to say, hey, given giving that a break, you see. The the.

• 1:20:07Rich Roll?

  It's like trying to pull a beer out of an alcoholic's hand.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and there's more and more. You know, data that's showing up now that that the the the relationship to these phones, because they're not phones. They're they're basically personal computers, they're laptops.

• 1:20:23Rich Roll?

  They're slot machines.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  In your hands, yeah, they're slot machines, and so. You know, it's there, it's addiction. You know, I find myself what I I've got this thing on my phone now that tells me how much time I'm spending on the phone.

• 1:20:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's alarming.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  It is alarming, even when I feel like I'm consciously being careful to try not to use it. And there 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.

• 1:20:57Rich Roll?

  Well, you can and you can tell yourself that that lie like, oh, well, I need to do this for my work.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:03Rich Roll?

  But in truth, you know, it is an addictive relationship and and, you know, creativity spawns out of solitude.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:12Rich Roll?

  Right. And so, you know, how do we, you know, cultivate that in our children's lives and in our in our own lives? Like, it requires a lot of discipline, you know, that discipline, you know, and really being good with boundaries.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  Well, we don't have the, we didn't grow up with the same distractions.

• 1:21:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I wasn't formed by it.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  We had, we had radio, we had hi fi's, is it called that? Right? We had record players and 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.

• 1:21:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  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. Kind of bums me out. I, I, I hate to sound like, you know, when I would bring up my kids, that's a little too much, you know, 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 know, you spend playing video games is it's not good. It's not good for you.

• 1:22:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And as somebody who's trying to, you know, find their voice, you gotta, you gotta find space first.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  Well, you have to find, you also have to, you have to be able to what it goes back to what I said, you know, you have to be comfortable being by yourself.

• 1:22:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  You know, to say.

• 1:22:44Rich Roll?

  You never have to be alone anymore.

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  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 were some, you know, I can remember when I'm saying I was bored and.

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  My father's remedy for that was go upstairs and, and get the A encyclopedia. I went upstairs, get the A encyclopedia, bring it down. Okay, what am I gonna do? Read it. What do you mean, read it? Start. And so, what was interesting was I was furious and sat there and he, he never let anything go. So it was hours and I'm sitting there.

• 1:23:32Rich Roll?

  If he told you to do it, you were gonna do it.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  No, you did it because we were, we had a very healthy fear of my father and,

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  and then, and then it started to become this thing.

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  And, uh, reading the encyclopedia.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  And what was interesting was, at a certain point, it started to get good to me.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  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, it didn't,

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  it was a level of solitude. Cause it wasn't, and my father would say, don't go and sit in the, in the middle of the living room with that book. You go to your room and you close the door.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  And it was, uh, you know, I, I suppose that's why sometimes there are nights when I can, I can run the board on Jeopardy. And, and, and I always attribute that, I'll turn to, to my kids and go, I don't, I don't know how I, no, I know how I know that.

• 1:24:48Rich Roll?

  Did you get all the way to Z?

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  No, no, I got, I'm trying to remember the last.

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  I got somewhere around M.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  And then I was out of the house.

• 1:25:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, you can't even find encyclopedias anymore.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  I still have them. I still have my encyclopedia Britannica.

• 1:25:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  And we had another one that was, that dealt purely with science, which was great. The encyclopedias of science.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  I think, but also I love to read, you know, my, my, my thing when I was a kid with my, my iPhone when I was a kid were toys and comic books. And that was my, my father would say, I don't wanna, you know, why don't you read a book? You're always reading that Fantastic Four and na, na, na, na, na, 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.

• 1:25:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  Because there's.

• 1:25:59Rich Roll?

  It's tough. It's tough to get young people to read.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  And then, once they start to do it, um, you know, hopefully they get hooked. I mean, my, 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.

• 1:26:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And you get to work with them. It's pretty cool.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  Which is really, you know, that's the, uh, that's the, that's one of the many things, but, and also music. I mean, there's, there's still within the household with, with all the distractions of iPhones and iPads, of which I suffer this, you know, the same malady. There's, 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, watch, 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, as long as it gets you up in the morning.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  And as long as it fulfills you. And, um, but alas, I look at all three of my kids. I, I, I would be surprised if they come to me and say, I'm, 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.

• 1:27:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So where's the, uh, the first like break? You're living in New York.

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  There was a lot of theater, years and years of theater, doing theater for no money, having no agent. Agents were very, very 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 Mamet play, American Buffalo, that I had done off Broadway. And I was, 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 said, "You're tired as well over." And I thought, "Jesus, you know, let me, let me, maybe."

• 1:28:30Rich Roll?

  What did I do last week?

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that was, you know, that was always a consideration. And, 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, and I, you know, as you sort of navigate, you know, that whole weird world, you know, 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, I didn't jump right in. And 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.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  And, and then he tracked me down back through mutual friends at the bar. Cause he, he drank at the, at the bar. And, and so, you know, he said, "You know, what's going on? Are you, you know, you, you want representation or not?" And, 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.

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  And then I did The Doors with Oliver Stone.

• 1:30:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  And that was kind of a, that was a long, long shoot. So they would, they were, you know, over months and months, they'd fly me out for two days and they'd say, you know, 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, was a Turner, a TNT sort of movie of the week, mini-series 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 a, a opposing gang member's death.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  And he went on to be the, become this marshal and changed 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 the sort of the version that we told. I mean, it was a little bit glorified because apparently he, he wasn't the most honest guy, but that, that, and that was the thing that I put on a bunch of weight for.

• 1:31:10Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:31:12Rich Roll?

  Like sixty pounds or something like that?

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I got, you know, 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, you know, it was kind of a, my career in that way has been kind of a slow burn, you know, and I think it better, better than too much, too quick.

• 1:31:30Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Certainly because I, I, while I was disciplined in my work, you know, 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.

• 1:31:52Rich Roll?

  Too much too soon.

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  I think it would have, I would have probably crashed and burned and.

• 1:31:58Rich Roll?

  But you've all, like, it doesn't look like you had any dry spells, like you've basically been consistently working.

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  Consistently working for sure, but there were definitely.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  Periods where, you know, where there were dry spells and also me trying to

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:32:25Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:32:38Rich Roll?

  Maybe you were when you were partying.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I, I mean, yeah, definitely. When I was, when I was, when I was deep in the tank,

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  I was certainly, um, you know, there's a long and, and somewhat undistinguished list of people that I've, you know, had physical altercations with in, in, in my younger years. And to a certain degree,

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  had, had a bit of a chip on my shoulder.

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  So I was very, um, for me, it was e- 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, um, confrontational guy. So I grew up in an environment where that was there all the time and kind of underlying and, and, um, but, uh,

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  I, 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, had a lot of cop friends. So I'd go in to read for these characters and it would resonate to people who kind of go, oh, that's kind of great. This, I mean, I remember a couple of times people saying, are you, were you a police officer before? And I go, huh? No, I'm, you know. Oh, what happened to your accent? I thought you were from Brooklyn. No, I don't have an accent, I, you know.

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  But uh, so I don't know. I don't, I don't, I don't, you know, I certainly. Now, that being said, I was doing those roles and it, 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 wa- it came along in time. It was the second, I want to say the second season of

• 1:34:30Rich Roll?

  NYPD Blue.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  NYPD Blue, where it all changed, where I got a call, oh, they want you to come in and, and uh, read for this role of playing this, 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, what I should be playing. I remember saying to my manager, I don't want to waste a meeting with David Milch and Steven Bochco for a role that they're not going to cast me in. And um, he 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, and, and I ended up getting, I was sort of cast right on the spot. Milch,

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  Milch said to me, um, you want to play this role? You know, it's you. And that, that came in a moment and it completely changed the perception of, of A, what I could do. And suddenly I was playing, well, I said, I went from being monosyllabic to polysyllabic. Uh, and with, with one, with one character. And, and, and that was this role of Dr. Monzac on NYPD Blue. And I, they would bring me back. Here and then they, they, they'd pull me back in for something, you know, Sipowicz. Uh, was, had a friend who had dementia or he was having, you know, um,

• 1:35:53Rich Roll?

  Was Dennis, did you do American?

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  erectile dysfunction.

• 1:35:56Rich Roll?

  Was, was the American Buffalo that you did with Dennis France?

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  No, no, no. That was, they, that was, uh, I can't remember the director's name. Uh, that was with Dustin Hoffman and I can't remember the, the kid's um, name, who, that was the film. The guy was from Providence, Rhode Island. Anyway, um. So then, all of a sudden, I'm 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.

• 1:36:34Speaker 01

  A pull also by the same, at the same time to play tough guys.

• 1:36:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  Villains, which I don't, I, they're, they're actually, they're fun characters to play. I always say it's, it's more fun to wear the guy with the black, to play the guy with the black hat than the white hat.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  For one thing, you know, the sort of sky's the limit, you know, you're, you're playing villains. These are people who don't play by the rules. And so there's something kind of

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  insanely heady about playing people who don't play by the rules. They just kind of, you know, and I, and I knew guys who were, who were in organized crime. I observed those guys. So I knew who they were, you know, and to watch them come into, into an establishment where people knew who they were and the kind of deference and also still the kind of

• 1:37:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  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. You knew that 90% of the people that were interacting with them were, they felt that it was out of survival. They were scared. They didn't, they weren't looking at these people and saying, oh, you know, hey, he killed a couple of people, but really at the end of the day, he's just a nice guy.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  So those, and also I don't like to stigmatize characters as being, you know, if you're, I always say, if you're playing a villain, you know, you

• 1:38:04Rich Roll?

  You can't have judgment on it.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  You can't have judgment on it. Don't play the result. Don't come in, you know, unless of course you're doing a Disney character. Or, or something like that, where it's required to, to telegraph that.

• 1:38:18Rich Roll?

  Well, that's a more one dimensional, you know, portrayal.

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's not as interesting.

• 1:38:22Rich Roll?

  Of a bad guy. Yeah.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:38:35Rich Roll?

  That was a bad dude.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  He was a really bad guy. He was a really, and, 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, you know, under the tyranny of, of the British government, that he was a, that the guy had a, you know, was a soldier, he was doing, 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.

• 1:39:13Rich Roll?

  How was it working with Kurt?

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  Great. It was great. Sutter and I had a lot of fun. We remain friends to this day and he's been, 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, you know, an extraordinarily bright guy and, and very funny. I mean, I, he always cracks me up the way he, he refers to himself as Walter Mitty with anger issues. I mean.

• 1:39:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah. He's a, 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.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:55Rich Roll?

  And he's got some anger stuff.

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:58Rich Roll?

  For sure, but.

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  But he's sweet.

• 1:39:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  The, the, at his core, you know, he, he's very, very sweet guy.

• 1:40:06Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  And, you know, particularly you see him with his kids.

• 1:40:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  He's, he's, oh, I think with all of us, right? That's, that becomes the thing. I mean, you know, that which we, how we are in the world and then, you know. It's our children, our children are our lives ultimately in that way, right? People always say, oh, when you're, what is it? How do you define being a parent? And I say, you define being a parent is when, when you become a parent, you have one of two things. Either you, you go, oh, I'm 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.

• 1:40:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I think Kurt is one of those people. I mean, I think he uses his art, his writing, his creative expression as a way to exorcise the demons that he has within so that he can be, you know, a present and loving, you know, partner and, and, and father.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:11Rich Roll?

  Um, so where, how does, how does, uh, 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.

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  He's a great filmmaker.

• 1:41:23Rich Roll?

  I mean, the mustache that you were rocking, Gone Baby, Baby Gone is like, will go down in cinema history. It's one of the all time great mustaches in movies.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  Except for Sam Elliott, he's still.

• 1:41:35Rich Roll?

  That's true. Yeah. Well, nobody can grow a mustache like that guy. But, but that, you know, the, the handlebars down the side, that was something to behold.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  That was a.

• 1:41:44Rich Roll?

  The chops.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  I had just, uh, finished shooting Deadwood or we were finishing it up and I, 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,

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  So I went in and I got put on tape and then I didn't hear anything for ever and ever and ever. And then months later, my then manager says, hey, you got a callback 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. You have any questions? No, I'm just gonna 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

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  happened to your accent?

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  What accent? He said, are you from Boston? I said, no, I'm not from Boston. Where do you? 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 I, when I, when I got there before the meeting, I was looking around and the waiting room was filled with all these.

• 1:43:30Rich Roll?

  Boston guys.

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  Well, no, they weren't. They were, 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 gonna 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, you know, had my hair pulled back and made a little bun to try to pull that off. And, but I remember seeing all these character actors and just thinking, yeah, you know, it's great that I'm getting to come in, but

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  it's not gonna happen. And so, 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.

• 1:44:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I've heard that from a lot of people.

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  And very funny. I mean, hysterically funny. And, and we just, we kind of hit it off. Not kind of, I mean, we really, really hit it off. And then when we.

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  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 don't, we got to figure out what we're going to do with this character's look. And, and 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, you know, have like 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 him to look like a guy who spends a lot of time on his appearance. And so I went into

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  the, to the hair trailer and, and my friend Trish Sweeney, who I worked with her on a couple of things. I said, let's just make it look like it's, it's a bad Supercuts job, which took more effort to make it look like a bad Supercuts job. And then, and he, and he signed off on the mustache. So I, you know, I took it all off of the mustache. But that whole, the whole process of making that film. Here was Ben, who was, that was the first time he was directing. And he just never had a sense of that. I mean, his confidence,

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  I mean, his great humility, don't get me wrong, but he knew exactly what he was doing. He was so well prepared. And, you know, it was a great cast. I mean, you know, it was, you know, Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman, just to name, name, you know, and, and then Amy, you know, we, we played siblings and, and, and Amy Madigan played my wife. And it was just one of those, you felt like you were, you were making a, a small independent film with a, with a better-

• 1:46:35Rich Roll?

  Big time actors.

• 1:46:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  But it was great. I mean, just the energy on the set and Casey and, and Michelle, such a wonderful cast of actors.

• 1:46:43Rich Roll?

  It holds up so well. I mean, you really see somebody who understands their craft, you know, the guy who made that movie. I mean, for a first time director-

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:54Rich Roll?

  You know, even given that he's been around for a long time. I mean, that's a, you know, a tall order to fill.

• 1:47:00Speaker 01

  Well, and that because the scope of that film was very, very big.

• 1:47:03Rich Roll?

  It's not a small independent movie. That is a-

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  No, it's not.

• 1:47:05Rich Roll?

  -big movie.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  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, in one of the offices and,

• 1:47:27Speaker 01

  and it's a long film, but it seemed to go by like that. And he was kind of patiently waiting and went, what'd you think? And, and I honestly couldn't answer him. I was still in the film, you know, I said, I, I,

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  I don't know what to say. And he went, what do you mean? And I said, I, I have to, this, 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.

• 1:48:03Rich Roll?

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

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  There was none of that, 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, in, in the film. And, and then of course he went on to do The Town, which now was, it still had that energy of being a, a very familial kind of independent world, but with a huge budget. And, and that's the way that he, he creates an environment, a creative,

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  collaborative environment where

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  you, you, you real, you know that you're

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

  involved with something that's, that's special.

• 1:48:57Rich Roll?

  So you have a sense when, when you're in the midst of shooting of the quality of the product that it's going to become. Cause I, you know, often I would imagine you might think it's all going great. And you see it later and you're like, that's not the movie I thought we were making.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, I've had a lot of those experiences where the thing feels like it's, it's something. And then you look at the final product and you, you know, I, I've just been gobsmacked at times where I thought, how could you take something?

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  It felt so right and and the end result just be so completely off the mark and wrong. But that's book, you know, without without failure, certainly, I mean, in in all degrees and in life, without failure, you can't have any, any true success. You don't learn.

• 1:49:44Rich Roll?

  Well, it's it's a miracle. Any movie gets made, you know, and when you see a bad movie, nobody signed up for a bad movie.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:49:50Rich Roll?

  You know, everybody went in with the best of intentions. It's just so difficult.

• 1:49:54Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:49:54Rich Roll?

  I imagine. And when something turns out great, I mean, that's just miracle upon miracle.

• 1:49:59Speaker 01

  Well, and also, the the whole kind of when I was coming up, the independent film market was still really, really strong.

• 1:50:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:50:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, we're seeing, you know, whether it's Amazon or Netflix or Hulu and all these other streaming platforms are filling that void that used to be, you know, the focus features and the

• 1:50:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:50:27Rich Roll?

  Miramax's of the world.

• 1:50:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:28Rich Roll?

  You know, it's it's it's an ebb and a flow. On some level, it seems like there's more outlets and opportunities now to work.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:35Rich Roll?

  I mean, there's so much content being created. I can't, you know, I'm like two seasons behind on Bosch. I can't keep up.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:50:40Rich Roll?

  Everything that's coming at me now.

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  No, it's hard because there is. I mean, every time you turn on on the thing, there's something new. There's something new, which is good. And also, you know, with with technology being where it is, I mean, people are going out and making films on their iPhones, right?

• 1:50:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  And they have

• 1:50:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, Soderbergh just made that that movie High Flying Bird.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:59Rich Roll?

  All with an iPhone.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:00Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  So, you know, back in the day, if you had a VHS, you could you could make, you know, a funky little thing, but it was never gonna.

• 1:51:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I know. I saw I watched Argo a couple of weeks ago. That movie holds up so well.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  It's a good film.

• 1:51:19Rich Roll?

  It's so good.

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  It's a really

• 1:51:21Rich Roll?

  I I really hope Affleck finds his way back to that kind of work.

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, he's he's always got stuff going. He's always got things going, you know, and he But he's a, you know, he's a triple threat and he's a really, really great actor and he obviously, you know, an Oscar, Oscar winning writer. And just, I have to say, pound for pound, one of the best directors I've ever worked with.

• 1:51:47Rich Roll?

  Wow. What is the difference between a great director and a, you know, an everyman director? You know, what are the qualities that you look for?

• 1:51:55Speaker 01

  Well, I think, first of all, he's a very, he's the most prepared director I've ever worked with. And that's not to say that other directors that I've 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. And he's not flipping open a screen and looking at a, at storyboards and a pre-visualization. The whole thing is in his head. It's, it's cut in his head. And he knows, he just knows every aspect of it, you know? He's probably committed the whole script to memory. And there's just something about his excitement.

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  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, and that's very contagious. And he's very collaborative. He's very, 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.

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  Is just, you know, what it, what it is. He's very, very.

• 1:53:43Speaker 01

  He's very intelligent. So.

• 1:53:46Speaker 01

  He, he has, all the departments are kind of covered. He's very literary, has a very literate mind. He has a really great technical mind. So he understands the camera. Completely.

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  And editing. And there's just a lot to be said for being very well prepared. I mean, there's nothing. It's, it's all been carefully conceived, which doesn't mean that he won't deviate from, from that which he, the idea.

• 1:54:14Rich Roll?

  Clear vision, knows exactly what he wants.

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  Clear vision, but it's also.

• 1:54:17Rich Roll?

  Open minded and collaborative.

• 1:54:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:19Rich Roll?

  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?

• 1:54:27Speaker 01

  I don't know what he would say. I don't know what he would say. He would say something. He'd, he'd make a smart ass remark. He'd probably say something.

• 1:54:35Rich Roll?

  Wouldn't answer it directly.

• 1:54:37Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:54:38Rich Roll?

  And even if you knew, you're probably not going to tell me.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  Scenes on the town. Where he, he just can't help himself. You need to, you do a, do a, do a scene and, you know, nail it and. You're like, cut. You go, okay. And he go, yep. Uh, yeah, well, we have to move on, but, um, yeah, it was pretty good. And then you kind of. Go, oh, do you want to do it again? Oh, it's not, it's not getting any better. I mean, it was 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 them, they.

• 1:55:54Speaker 01

  They they get that with Ben, you know, they they because he he's not gonna leave until he sees you okay, which is which is something that you don't always get, you know, he'll he will not move on till go, you okay, you good? Yeah. You sure? To which the first time he ever said that to me, I said, boy, why why you ask me if I'm sure?

• 1:56:18Rich Roll?

  Well, because

• 1:56:18Speaker 01

  Are you sure?

• 1:56:19Rich Roll?

  He he he came up as an actor.

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  And he cares and he knows he knows the agony of that thing of second guessing that sometimes actors can can go, but you know, i- i- if somebody said to me, um, for the rest of your career, you're only gonna work with Ben Affleck, I would be more than happy with that.

• 1:56:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's cool. Um, is is there a huge difference between that? I mean, you've done these huge movies like Transformers. I mean, that's gotta be a whole different animal altogether.

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, because that those things really become less about performance. I mean, well, you have to, 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.

• 1:57:15Rich Roll?

  It's what it's like to be Tom Cruise.

• 1:57:17Speaker 01

  It's like, yeah, well, and you know, he's the master of that. And, um, you know, it's and it's a very, very, very technical, those films, because you're you're, you know, you're reacting to things that aren't there. And, uh, and, you know, once again, Michael Bay, very, very well-prepared guy. I mean, 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.

• 1:57:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:58:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, there's all these mythic stories.

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  He gets loud. He gets loud and he, but he's also, you know, he's, he's a taskmaster. He wants, 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, 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, in expressing his, his, his concerns or his dissatisfaction.

• 1:58:55Speaker 01

  But I, 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.

• 1:59:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  That kind of, that kind of worked well.

• 1:59:12Rich Roll?

  As a, as a big comic book guy, do you like, would you want to dip your toe in the whole Marvel universe?

• 1:59:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would. It's just, I mean, you know, I did, I recurred on the show Agents of Shield, 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 film, Easter egg films that they make. And now when you go to see a Marvel film, you know that you gotta hang out because there's at least one, if not two, Easter eggs.

• 1:59:39Rich Roll?

  So you're solidified in the canon as that person?

• 1:59:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, look, is it?

• 1:59:46Speaker 01

  You know, it was a, it was a dream when I was a kid, it 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 with Christopher Reeve, it was, you know, I remember thinking, great, now the doors are gonna open and, you know, Marvel will start doing this and.

• 2:00:05Rich Roll?

  You had to wait until your 50s.

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I enjoy those films. I mean, I thoroughly enjoy, you know, they're, they're really well crafted and I feel like the whole, the whole Marvel universe, those characters is very sophisticated. Stan Lee had a, had a kind of genius, you know, himself and all the people that he surrounded himself with and collaborated.

• 2:00:25Speaker 01

  You know, it's, uh, 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.

• 2:00:35Rich Roll?

  It's such an interesting thing. Like if you didn't know that about you, like you, 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, you, you, I wouldn't, I wouldn't presume that you would be like this comic book guy, but I know like how like.

• 2:00:58Speaker 01

  Well, you know.

• 2:00:59Rich Roll?

  Much of a fan.

• 2:01:00Speaker 01

  You know all my truths.

• 2:01:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because.

• 2:01:02Speaker 01

  Cause of sideshow.

• 2:01:03Rich Roll?

  You're a freak for sideshow.

• 2:01:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm a total nerd. I'm a nerd. I mean, and, and I was when I was a kid.

• 2:01:08Rich Roll?

  He just turns into a kid when he kind of.

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:01:10Rich Roll?

  I can't get rid of this guy. He wants to come to sideshow every day.

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  I know. They gotta give me a key card, although, you know, but that, that, that's my, uh.

• 2:01:23Speaker 01

  I don't know. The, I, I've always been immersed in sort of pop culture, but of course I, you know, growing up in the sixties, that's when that pop culture kind of exploded. Everything became bigger and more colorful with the psychedelic art and you had Peter Max and Roy Lichtenstein and, 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, you know, there's a part of it that.

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  That we just don't have any, you know, it's like now we have, we have phones.

• 2:01:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:59Speaker 01

  You know, my, 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, um,

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  and I just think it was, 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, their, their first stuff was, you know, the, the World War One things and, and the, the, you know, the General Custer and the Billy the Kid and all these kind of interesting,

• 2:02:54Speaker 01

  but it, it, it took that whole thing to a different level. I mean, Greg and I have had those conversations where I've said to him, you know, all these people who work not only at Sideshow and, 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.

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  These people are, are, um, they're all artists.

• 2:03:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Incredible artists.

• 2:03:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:03:32Rich Roll?

  Because it's pop culture.

• 2:03:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. But so people sort of tend to sort of poo poo it.

• 2:03:37Rich Roll?

  And we should say for people that are listening that don't know, Sideshow is a, is a company

• 2:03:44Rich Roll?

  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 the Star Wars movies, Marvel Universe.

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  DC and then their own stuff. And they do sculptures, they do one six scale, you know, 12 inch figures that have 33 points of articulate, yeah.

• 2:04:08Rich Roll?

  And it's staffed by these artists, as you mentioned, who are incredibly skilled at, you know, painting in the greatest detail or crafting, you know, costumes and sculptors, people that

• 2:04:23Rich Roll?

  If there was no sideshow, you want, 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, you know, I didn't grow up with comic books and this is, you know, 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 like has a whole room in his house filled with this stuff.

• 2:04:57Speaker 01

  His house is a museum.

• 2:04:58Rich Roll?

  You probably collected a bunch of it as well.

• 2:04:59Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I have a room.

• 2:05:00Rich Roll?

  And it's a whole world.

• 2:05:02Speaker 01

  It's easy for it to take over, but I have a room, which is sort of like, we'll call it the, the screening room for, cause 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, the He-Man Girl Haters Club that, that Alfalfa had, you know, tacked on, on the treehouse.

• 2:05:24Rich Roll?

  The toxic masculinity.

• 2:05:25Speaker 01

  I don't even, I don't even, yeah, I guess so. Maybe it's the toxic masculinity, but, but I have this room where my, 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, you know, filled with sideshow stuff.

• 2:05:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:44Speaker 01

  And, and, and that's my, that's my sort of, you know, my fortress of solitude. I can go in there and close the doors and it's not like I'm, I'm getting up and posing these things all over the place, but a lot of them, because they relate directly to, to films that I love. There's some, there's this odd connection between looking at, you know, Iron Man on, in the movie and then looking over on the shelf and there is, there it is. And you can, you know, 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,

• 2:06:28Speaker 01

  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 to things.

• 2:06:42Rich Roll?

  That's nice, Titus.

• 2:06:43Speaker 01

  No, they think aesthetically. But then the, the, the other irony of that is that

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  People will come to my house.

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  And, you know, for a dinner party or something and.

• 2:06:58Rich Roll?

  Everybody ends up down in the.

• 2:06:59Speaker 01

  Well, at some point, because it seems like a museum.

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  Both men and women will come in and go, wow, this is. This is incredible. What are all these things? Or, 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, it's not hurting anybody.

• 2:07:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:34Rich Roll?

  What's the, uh, 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?

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  Well, I started to, I, I wrote a television pilot for myself, several, two television pilots for myself a couple of years ago, and I was kind of disenfranchised with the whole business. And, and I thought, you know, I, I, I gotta create something that I can really connect to. And, you know, interestingly enough, just as I was getting ready to go out to the, to the pitch phase with my manager to start to do that, is when Bosch landed on my, on my desk. But I've, um, I started writing a screenplay with my oldest son, Ayman, last summer. And I've got a lot of stories. I have a lot of stories. The TV pilots, I don't, I, you know, they're good. I'd like to. But I may be, for one, I think I might be a tad old for it now.

• 2:08:30Speaker 01

  Which is okay. And I'm, you know, I'm hoping that will, that Bosch will run for, 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 sixties in the books and the whole chronology of the books, he's in his sixties and he's, he's still working as like a volunteer. Cold case detective.

• 2:08:49Rich Roll?

  A lot of legs left on this thing.

• 2:08:51Speaker 01

  You know, he's, he's not going anywhere.

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  So I. I guess what I'd like to ultimately do is to start to direct and/or act in films that I write. And do them with my friends and do them with my family. Because I think there's, um.

• 2:09:14Speaker 01

  Those have always been kind of dreams of mine and that they don't need to be gigantic films.

• 2:09:23Speaker 01

  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 Bosch, when you work with a group of people that are, you know, family and friends, you get, 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.

• 2:09:52Speaker 01

  And, and I know that it probably sounds Marxist to a certain degree, but it's,

• 2:09:58Speaker 01

  it's worked, 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.

• 2:10:11Rich Roll?

  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?

• 2:10:21Speaker 01

  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,

• 2:10:30Speaker 01

  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, and, and, you know, the pursuit of being an artist in whatever discipline of art, you know, by, by society's estimation, it is irresponsible, you know? It's always that thing we hear people say, what are you going to fall back on?

• 2:10:59Rich Roll?

  Right. It is kind of an outlaw, you know, way to live your life.

• 2:11:04Speaker 01

  I'm okay with that.

• 2:11:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:07Speaker 01

  I'm okay because it's, to me, I remember at one point when I, I had kind of a bumpy semester when I was at NYU. I was, I think I was, you know, I had a girlfriend that was in, in another city and I was, you know, not going to class and going to see her and, and my.

• 2:11:30Speaker 01

  My father was 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 you're you're floundering here and there and and.

• 2:11:41Rich Roll?

  It's time for you gotta go back to inward bound.

• 2:11:44Speaker 01

  Well, I thought, yeah, this is round two, right?

• 2:11:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  Although at that point, I was old enough to say, well, I'm, you know, I'm 21. You can't you can't pull me back into the graduate school of inward bound. Can't fuck up. And. And he. He said, look, you know, nobody's. Nobody's forcing you to do any of this stuff. I mean, if you're not, you know, and I don't think that you need a college education in order to to achieve success. But, you know, if you're not gonna if you're not gonna see this through, then, you know, don't waste, don't waste time, don't, don't waste money. And. And I realized that because he said to me, all art's a little long and a little boring.

• 2:12:30Speaker 01

  And that really resonated with me because it was it was at a time when I was kind of going eh, you know, I don't know, I don't know, is this what it's? Because there's so much of that in the beginning is an act of so much desperation, there's so much pressure. And and you see not only yourself, but other people so focused sometimes on entirely the wrong things, you know, they're talking about, you know, the social aspect of, well, if I if I can, you know, get invited to some of these parties, I could go and move and shake or, oh, I met this producer and, you know, at the end, I'm here to tell you that that's bullshit. It's empty. It, you know, I've never been, I've been at many, many parties with famous directors

• 2:13:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:13:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:24Speaker 01

  It's just.

• 2:13:25Rich Roll?

  I was just having that conversation with my eldest boy the other night at dinner. It was his birthday, he's a musician, you know, he's trying to make his way and 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 gotta be at all these parties or if you're at the right bar, whatever, you're gonna meet that person. It's like the people that are successful are going to bed early and they're fucking working.

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:55Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  Hard.

• 2:13:56Rich Roll?

  They're grinding. For a long time and ultimately, you know, the cream rises to the top.

• 2:14:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:02Rich Roll?

  And those are the people that become employed and make their way.

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, it's, it, it, it, look, it's, it's not for everyone. It's certainly not for the faint of heart. Um, you know, that, that thing I can remember, you know, being in a friend's house or something and where they had a very different environment in which they grew up and the parents would say, so, so Titus, what are you gonna do if this doesn't work out? And it never occurred to me that it wasn't gonna work out. And that's not because I, I was arrogant. I just, I knew that this was the only thing that I really wanted to do.

• 2:14:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, for somebody like you, there's value in not having a plan B.

• 2:14:44Speaker 01

  Well, my

• 2:14:45Rich Roll?

  If you have the constitution.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  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, you know, with my mother, she was, was very, very gifted. She got, ended up getting a teaching gig very, very early on, but then also kind of realized that her focus was, was being sort of, you know, watered down a bit because she had the, she had the security of having a fairly, you know, a regular daily job which she could depend on. And she said, you know, I started to,

• 2:15:29Speaker 01

  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, you know, and, uh, she said, and then I got a job. I got a job being, you know, as, as a fashion illustrator. And she said, I stopped teaching.

• 2:15:48Speaker 01

  And I get that, you know, that's, uh,

• 2:15:50Rich Roll?

  So for you, the job becomes, how do you not get soft? I mean, cause you have, you know, you have predictable employment, playing the same character for not just the foreseeable future, but perhaps for a very long time.

• 2:16:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:16:03Rich Roll?

  And it would be very easy for you to just kind of settle into that, you know, show up and, and check the box. As an artist, you know, how do you maintain, you know, that, that tension to keep pushing the envelope and testing yourself?

• 2:16:15Speaker 01

  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, you know, a- as this was approaching, my, my late wife was very, very ill. And it, 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, 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.

• 2:16:58Speaker 01

  So I was working on this thing for myself and it had legs and I thought, okay, I can do that. But there, there is always, there was always a sort of a hesitation to a certain degree, e- e- even when I desperately needed money and to survive, to do the regular, uh, jumping through hoops of pilot season. You'd, you know, you'd read something and you'd, you'd kind of go, eh, yeah, I'll, I'll do that. Well, you gotta move to Vancouver. Oh, really? Uh, well, maybe not, but you need to make, you know, you know, and I had three kids I had to take care of and, uh, and a sick wife and, um, but when, so when Bosch came

• 2:17:43Speaker 01

  along, it became that thing of sort of, I would start to, right before that, I was looking at pilot scripts. And, 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, and to, 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.

• 2:18:25Speaker 01

  But, and I just knew myself well enough that if I was gonna 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

• 2:19:09Speaker 01

  to be, 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.

• 2:19:29Rich Roll?

  Did he write the pilot?

• 2:19:31Speaker 01

  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 wanna play this character for? And the honest answer was, I'll, 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, your career. I've had lots of characters that I, that I've thoroughly, I've been very lucky that way, there've been very, very few jobs where I've kind of gone, ah, Jesus, this again, I don't really wanna, but okay, cuz I gotta, you know, I got a mortgage and car payments and private school to pay for.

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  It's just a ca, 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. 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, Jimmy O'Fallon as well, he was a fun character to play. I mean, he was, he, his moral compass was so magnetized that he, he couldn't find his ass with a map, but.

• 2:20:52Speaker 01

  There was an energy and and 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 the long answer about playing a character on a series. If it's if it's really well realized, you know, I think if you get to a point where they run out of gas, which wouldn't happen with a character like Bosch, but I've seen other shows, either they they come out of the box and they have tremendous success and it's explosive. Then you gotta stretch it. And then you get into season four and all of a sudden you kind of you can see them losing their way.

• 2:21:35Speaker 01

  Or what they and then 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 there there's more explosions, you know, and and Aliens. Aliens and ass and, you know, what have you and gunplay. And that's that's not to say that that that those things don't have value, you know, I always say, you know, there, well, all art, yes, all art is subjective, but all art is not necessarily subjective because there's there's good art and there's bad art.

• 2:22:20Speaker 01

  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. But

• 2:22:43Speaker 01

  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 and Order, Special Victims Unit, and Mariska is an old friend of mine, and they're in their 19th season, moving into their, into their 20th season.

• 2:23:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, how does she stay energized?

• 2:23:08Speaker 01

  You know, because the scripts are good. And the character is interesting and they're, and, and they find ways to, to move that character periodically out of, out of the comfort zone.

• 2:23:21Rich Roll?

  Well, she's become an advocate for women as a result of the position that that role has placed her in.

• 2:23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:28Speaker 01

  And that's,

• 2:23:32Speaker 01

  and she would be the first to say, as long as it's, as long as they keep it interesting. You know, you don't have to, they don't have to put on a rocket ship, you know, or, or cure world hunger to make that character interesting. Sometimes you just.

• 2:23:48Rich Roll?

  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.

• 2:23:58Speaker 01

  Right. It's comfort food.

• 2:23:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:24:00Speaker 01

  But it's also no harm, no foul, right? I mean, I love,

• 2:24:06Speaker 01

  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 love every aspect of that show. I love the performances, the writing, the cinematography, the music, the, the whole concept of the show to me. Now, does that tickle that collector, pop culture, comic book nerd?

• 2:24:34Speaker 01

  itch that I have. Yeah, but I also think it has above the the the value of entertainment. It it has it has value and to me it's art.

• 2:24:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's there's huge artistic merit in that show.

• 2:24:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely. But I can also watch something like, you know, Fixer Upper, which is kind of banal and to a certain degree, but I but I'm entertained by it.

• 2:25:04Speaker 01

  You know, but I'm not, but I can't. I can't watch The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or the Kardashians because that I I I I'm physically

• 2:25:17Rich Roll?

  Soul killing.

• 2:25:18Speaker 01

  It's soul killing.

• 2:25:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:19Speaker 01

  And I'm physically allergic to that stuff. It ma- it it makes me ill.

• 2:25:25Speaker 01

  And, you know, there 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.

• 2:25:45Speaker 01

  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 I just, you know, I don't I don't want her watching that stuff because that's not. And not everything needs to be inspirational, you know, it's not that. I just, I don't know. It it offends. It offends me. It hurts. It hurts my, like you said, it's soul crushing.

• 2:26:23Rich Roll?

  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.

• 2:26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:36Rich Roll?

  So I gather that, you know, this practice of gratitude is a central aspect of how you kind of navigate your life.

• 2:26:45Speaker 01

  Well, I was I was raised that way because both of my parents grew up. My mother, I think, was a little bit more upper, upper middle or middle class. My father grew up really poor, really, really, really poor.

• 2:27:03Speaker 01

  There was a

• 2:27:06Speaker 01

  a constant reminder

• 2:27:12Speaker 01

  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 I can remember being in a, going through a little village and being stunned. And my dad was one of the, also one of those guys who would, who would, you know, grab a copy of National Geographic, you know, when you didn't want to eat cauliflower and, and, you know, show you children with rice belly and exposed ribs and

• 2:28:00Speaker 01

  but that's because he grew up with, I mean, they, they hunted and trapped and, and, you know, they were and made their own food and grew their own food and

• 2:28:11Speaker 01

  so my parents were very, were always very, very big on gratitude. And I realized that

• 2:28:19Speaker 01

  it's something that's, that's always kind of served me well, because I think, you know, it's very easy with things being so readily available to us

• 2:28:31Speaker 01

  that we take a lot of that stuff for granted. But, but gratitude is I just think it's, it's integral to having, you know,

• 2:28:45Speaker 01

  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, and have had my struggles in many different areas in, in my adult life. But I've, I've also found that, that the parallel to that a lot of times was when I, 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, from being grateful.

• 2:29:24Rich Roll?

  Well, you seem like, you know, a pretty, I mean, I know you well enough to know that you're a pretty grounded dude. You know, you could be walking around like an entitled prick, you know, and there's plenty of people in this town that, that, that do that. But, um, you know, I've seen you, you know, with your family and you, 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.

• 2:29:59Speaker 01

  Well, I think you have to look, you, you have to have self-confidence. And some particularly in, in the art world, right? You have to have self-confidence and, and, and almost maybe up to the edge, you know, of, of arrogance. Because if you don't, if you don't have that strength, if you don't have that, that, that belief and that drive, then, you know, what, what is it, what, what, what is the thing that fuels that?

• 2:30:32Speaker 01

  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, you know, moments of reflection where you can kind of go like, okay, this is overwhelming. This is, you know, I haven't booked a gig in three months and my bank account is, is almost dry. And I don't know if it's the laws of attraction.

• 2:31:16Speaker 01

  But I just know that when you're in a positive place and you're expressing gratitude, those things tend to, I, I, I don't know. I mean, you know, I'm not.

• 2:31:27Rich Roll?

  That void gets filled.

• 2:31:28Speaker 01

  I'm not Einstein, you know, I can't, I wish I could solve the problems of, of the cosmos, but there's.

• 2:31:36Speaker 01

  I just feel that gratitude and humility

• 2:31:42Speaker 01

  are things that 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 it's, 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 because part of that is, yeah, you have to have the humility. Because if you, if you get to a place of success and people are whispering in both ears about, you know, you can have anything you want, da, da, da, da, da, da. The rules don't apply to you.

• 2:32:27Speaker 01

  Basic fundamentals of decency and kindness.

• 2:32:32Speaker 01

  Those are the things that really bother me. When I, when I see

• 2:32:37Speaker 01

  an actor or, you know, air quote here, celebrity,

• 2:32:43Speaker 01

  being rude or acting entitled. It infuriates me, particularly when they're not talented.

• 2:32:53Speaker 01

  Because then I want to say, boy, you should be exercising the highest

• 2:32:57Rich Roll?

  Double time on the gratitude.

• 2:32:59Speaker 01

  Double time on the gratitude because you're just lucky. You're just lucky.

• 2:33:07Speaker 01

  And I just feel that that's, you know, it's really the fuel. It's the fuel of, of, of success comes from awareness, not just self-awareness, but awareness of the people around you. You need 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.

• 2:33:35Speaker 01

  So it's it's very easy to become sort of dislodged by that and and sort of thrown into the place of just, you know, circling the drain of going, what, what, when, when, when? And and typically, you know, it's sort of like, you know, on social media, a lot of times on Facebook, where you'll see people vent about, you know, and or, you know, post about every single trespass.

• 2:34:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:05Speaker 01

  Or, you know, today I was at Starbucks and the barista was rude and na, na, na, na, na, na, na. And and then the next day they go, yeah, I can't get an agent, you know, I I've been, I worked in this business for 10 years, but I, you know, I haven't had an agent for three years, I can't get an agent, you know, what's where the industry is doing that, na, na, na, na, na. I always sort of go, you're just, you're, you're a magnet for negativity.

• 2:34:31Rich Roll?

  That just begets more of that, becomes a self perpetuating.

• 2:34:34Speaker 01

  You know.

• 2:34:35Rich Roll?

  Cycle of victimhood and blame.

• 2:34:37Speaker 01

  Well, years ago, when that, when, when that book and that video, The Power, came out and everybody was making fun of it.

• 2:34:43Rich Roll?

  Oh, The Secret, you mean?

• 2:34:44Speaker 01

  The Secret.

• 2:34:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:46Speaker 01

  And then, then The Power, which came afterwards. And I remember showing it to, to my mother, my mother went, okay, I'll read it. And she read it and, 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, you can manifest these things. And she said, so it's not, it's not really a secret. But I remember being kind of taken aback by that.

• 2:35:24Rich Roll?

  Like you thought you were gonna impart this wisdom.

• 2:35:27Speaker 01

  I was gonna drop something.

• 2:35:28Rich Roll?

  Your mom's like, this is old news?

• 2:35:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, she kind of said, this is old news in a new wrapping. She said, but it's not to discredit it because, she said, I really think that, you know, as a society, we, we gravitate towards the negative so easily. It becomes, it's so much easier to complain than to.

• 2:35:50Speaker 01

  About what we don't have than to express gratitude for what we do have. And that landed on me in a big way.

• 2:35:56Rich Roll?

  And it's not cool to be earnest about positive things.

• 2:36:00Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:36:01Rich Roll?

  Especially when you're trying to be a badass in New York.

• 2:36:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:36:28Rich Roll?

  Social media is always good for one of those guys.

• 2:36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, you wanted to say, well, you know what? I happen to have the film strip of my life. So look at chapters, you know, three, six, nine, all the way through to 17. And, and you can see, you know, that journey. It's, you know, it's a,

• 2:36:51Speaker 01

  I don't know, it, it, it becomes a sort of, you know, it's like death, you know? It's the price of admission. I mean, you know, um, there are just certain attitudes and things that are productive and, and others that are, that are counterproductive.

• 2:37:07Rich Roll?

  Last thing I want to ask you about, which is kind of the guiding principles for, for living a, a successful artist life. You know, somebody who's blazes 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, you know, empowered you through the more difficult times?

• 2:37:41Speaker 01

  I, uh, well, it goes back to gratitude, but it also.

• 2:37:46Speaker 01

  It's it's self reliance. And I think within gratitude. If you you have to find a place to be able to be by 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 you want to be famous? If you want to be famous, go. You know, do something and have your friends film it and they can post it on YouTube or be infamous. Right?

• 2:38:29Speaker 01

  What you have to define, 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, that's, you know, 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. Do find that thing. That that becomes your life force that becomes your drive. It's not just to because this whole idea of being, you know, goals or being goal oriented work

• 2:39:14Speaker 01

  for certain things. Being goal oriented as an artist is a fool's errand.

• 2:39:21Rich Roll?

  Well, there's so little that you can control.

• 2:39:23Speaker 01

  Because you can't control it, right? Now, if you're. If you're. If you're running. And you're trying to beat a time or something like that, that's a whole different thing.

• 2:39:36Rich Roll?

  It's a linear path.

• 2:39:39Speaker 01

  But by the same token. We, you know, you're cruising along and you step on a bad pebble and you and you turn your leg. Now you're out of business for a while. I think that it. It's important to be passionate, and I'm sorry, passion is kind of overused, is to be really focused and centered and truthful with yourself. Am I doing this because 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 arts for, well, a myriad of different reasons.

• 2:40:22Speaker 01

  You know, 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. You know, it's the teeth of a gale. You've got to, 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 haven't worked

• 2:41:07Speaker 01

  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 to have a plan. You have to say, okay, 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.

• 2:41:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and the discipline to weather the obstacles. Like if you presume, like presume an even playing field between a couple of different people that are all equally talented and equally passionate, who are driven to do this, you know, the obstacles are going to wear some of those people down.

• 2:41:54Speaker 01

  Oh, they do.

• 2:41:54Rich Roll?

  And they're going to be out.

• 2:41:56Speaker 01

  They check out quickly.

• 2:41:57Rich Roll?

  So 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 is more powerful than that. They can override that.

• 2:42:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:42:40Speaker 01

  You know, it's Hunter Thompson said, you know, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. And that's what, and that's, that's my, that's my mantra, you know? Yeah, when it gets weird, you, you know, you gotta be weirder. And, and because it's a

• 2:42:58Speaker 01

  all, all the, all the other stuff that comes along, the accoutrement, that, that's kind of fleeting at the end of the and unless you're a complete psychopath and a narcissist, right?

• 2:43:11Speaker 01

  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 I, that makes me feel good. Right? But I'm also, you'll, you're never gonna find me standing in JFK with a Bosch hat.

• 2:43:29Rich Roll?

  Waiting for somebody.

• 2:43:30Speaker 01

  And a Deadwood T-shirt, you know, just kind of looking around like anytime.

• 2:43:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Actually, we should make that YouTube video. That would be good.

• 2:43:42Rich Roll?

  Just have people walk by, no one's paying attention to you.

• 2:43:46Speaker 01

  And you just go Bosch.

• 2:43:52Speaker 01

  No, it, it's because that and the, that at the end, um, it, it is, it's the, I, I always say sustenance, but that's what it, that's what it feels like, you know, when you, when I come off of a, a long day of, of shooting. And, uh, yeah, am I, am I tired? Absolutely. 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

• 2:44:35Rich Roll?

  It's a gift, man.

• 2:44:36Speaker 01

  There's nothing more fulfilling and that's when not only gratitude, but tremendous joy, right? Even particularly when it's so and I always joke, I mean, this is my way of kind of breaking it up with the crew when, you know, we're into our 15th, 16th hour on Friday, which is now Saturday morning.

• 2:45:01Speaker 01

  And there's just that, that kind of, you know, grumbling hubbub of

• 2:45:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:45:22Speaker 01

  Because we all laugh because at the end of the day, it doesn't suck.

• 2:45:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, everybody knows that they're stoked to be part of this thing.

• 2:45:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:45:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:45:42Speaker 01

  We're entertaining and we're making art. What a, what a cool way to, to make a living, to, to, to do that. And so, yeah, this show sucks, right?

• 2:45:55Rich Roll?

  Well, you got a great place to put a pin in it. This show sucks.

• 2:45:59Speaker 01

  This show does not suck.

• 2:46:01Rich Roll?

  When do you, when do you start shooting again?

• 2:46:03Speaker 01

  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, not so the other great thing about working with this group of people, despite the success, you know, the critical success and all of that of the show, no one has ever Fell back and sort of rested on their laure. I mean, each season, you know, the, the effort to choose the right book, to take it to the next level and to raise the bar for ourselves. Cause you know, Colin always says, we're, we're only as good as the challenges that we present for ourselves, which is true. And, and this season is, is

• 2:46:46Speaker 01

  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, they'll be well rewarded for their patience. Cause I know it's a long wait.

• 2:46:58Rich Roll?

  So that, that's April 19th.

• 2:47:00Speaker 01

  April 19th.

• 2:47:01Rich Roll?

  19th coming up, man. That's cool. I want to come to the set. Can I get a set visit?

• 2:47:05Speaker 01

  Anytime, anytime. And you get a hat and a T-shirt.

• 2:47:09Rich Roll?

  I'll go to JFK and stand.

• 2:47:11Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 2:47:12Rich Roll?

  And we got to get you running again, dude.

• 2:47:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 2:47:15Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 2:47:15Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:47:16Rich Roll?

  All right. We'll make it.

• 2:47:16Speaker 01

  Right after my next cigarette.

• 2:47:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cool. All right. Uh, thank you, man.

• 2:47:21Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:47:22Rich Roll?

  Super, uh, great to, um, connect with you today. I really appreciate it.

• 2:47:26Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, man. This was a lot of fun.

• 2:47:28Rich Roll?

  Best of luck, man.

• 2:47:28Speaker 01

  Thank you, brother.

• 2:47:29Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 2:47:29Speaker 01

  Peace.

• 2:47:32Rich Roll?

  Good man, that Titus. What an interesting dude, right? Great storyteller and just, uh, one of the greats working out there in Hollywood. Uh, for more on Titus, if you enjoyed this conversation, please check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com and, uh, 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

• 2:48:15Rich Roll?

  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

• 2:48:57Rich Roll?

  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/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 Margot Lubin for

• 2:49:39Rich Roll?

  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. Ally Rogers for portraits. DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships and theme music by Anna Lima. 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. Amaste.