Lee Tergesen Quotations

I really don't feel like I'm being typecast,

I pretty much do what I like. There was a little concern when I first started the show from TNT that maybe I was a little too soft. They didn't really get where I was coming from, because I'm funny.

It's not the first time I had to get in drag, ... Oz.

He's sort of a loose cannon with a quick wit, ... He's somebody who of course is intense. I always wind up playing somebody a little intense. Maybe I'm just intense.

I think for Beecher specifically, Keller was with him when his wife died. Beecher had decided after he first got into prison that he had to shut off everybody. You can't let anybody in and you have to become like them and you have to be threatening and all that.

But we both came to the decision that the powerful thing is to go into your fear, walk in there with it, don't walk away from it, and to try to be true to it.

It's definitely intense to walk away from at the end of each season.

As I walk around, I have met 70-year-old women who live on the Upper West Side who love the show. And I met a couple in Kansas - a couple of truck drivers who drove around together - who loved it. It's popular all over the place and definitely in the gay community.

When I was 21 or so, and I started to grow my hair - this was maybe two years before 'Wayne's World' - they were like 'What are you doing? ... You're such the all-American guy.' But I would go in and read for these parts, and it never excited me to play the guy who doesn't have any sort of point of view and edge,

I think I knew I wasn't what people looked at and saw in me. I love characters. I love things that have dimension and depth, that are hard to figure out.