Top 22 Denis OHare Quotes

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

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

I moved to New York City in ’92 and had no money. I had a lot of free time, as actors do. I would go to the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.

I read five books on the Constitution. My favorite was ‘Plain, Honest Men’ by Richard Beeman. I went on a science jag in the same way. I kept getting in arguments about evolution and being bested. So I read Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of the Species,’ a fantastic book that is not that difficult.

I was actually a poetry major in college before I punted and decided to become a theater major. I wrote the poem that we put on the sauerkraut boxes in the style of Elling.

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

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

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

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

Especially when it comes to something like the awards, I find it kind of baffling that ‘True Blood’ has been snubbed so many times given the incredible range of acting they have on there; I mean, incredible storytelling and the incredible production values.

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

I love monsters, I love creatures, I love beings, I love aliens. That’s more supernatural and more the stuff of fairy tales. Fairy tales are as ancient as we are. I love those stories. I think they’re really interesting because they always have more than simply the fright aspect. There’s something deeply psychological.

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

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

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

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

I read ‘Dracula’ in high school. I’ve been around vampires forever.

When I did ‘Racing Demon’ by David Hare, I worked with Paul Giamatti, who had stacks of books in his dressing room. I was offstage a lot, so I would go read in his room. He was reading a four-part series on the Byzantine Empire by Alexander A. Vasiliev. I read two of those during the run of the play.

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

Whether it’s writing a monologue or writing standup or writing a screenplay or writing a play, I think staying involved in the creation of your own work empowers you in a way, even if you don’t ever do it. It gives you a sense of ownership and a sense of purpose, which I think as an actor is really important.

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

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