ATO ESSANDOH

Quentin Tarantino and Sam Jackson are the reasons I'm an actor.

My parents are from Ghana. Until I was 17, I thought you had to go to college. I had no idea. I didn't know it was not an option.

I was in chemical engineering at Cornell University. My girlfriend at the time dared me to do a play. I knew there was something I wanted, not necessarily engineering.

Another benefit of going to Cornell is that 90 percent of your friends are doctors.

What's nice about having an engineering degree is everybody thinks you are smart.

I grew up listening to blues and rock n' roll and other music, but, legitimately, the Stones is one of my favorite bands in the world.

I have a theater company that I'm a part of, Colt Coeur, and they do some really rad projects.

All of my friends on the street we're Jewish. I went to a lot of bar and bat mitzvahs. I even learned a little Hebrew.

'Copper' is my first period piece. It's funny because I've been doing a lot of episodes of 'Elementary' with Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu; they keep bringing me back on the show, and so I go from being an outstanding black doctor to being a kind of hood, ex-car thief who went through rehab in 'Elementary.'

I think I'm a good actor, but to replicate tens of thousands of man hours in surgery is really hard.

You look at how Barack Obama has had to conduct himself as president. It reminds me of Jackie Robinson, how he had to be very careful to reassure people that this was all right.

Just the little bit that I've learned about Judaism, I didn't realize how, dare I say, intense that religion is as far as all of the things that you have to know and remember and the ritualism of it.

I never heard about tefillin. I was unfamiliar with the deep history and ritual of being an Orthodox Jew. Before you get out of bed, you say a prayer, and then you get out of bed, say another one.

There's some dues that you just have to pay in life.

You don't want to be a gimmick. You don't want to be a set piece, where people go, 'Hey, that's weird.'

In a law enforcement situation, black people are not always treated the same as white people would be.

I have the softest beard in the world. As far as growing it, it doesn't itch, and it's so non-intrusive. But, I am so sick of hair on my face and on my head. Because I'm not a really hairy guy, I'm not really used to it.

I see it in a lot of period pieces where everybody is standing and talking, in a stilted, archaic way, instead of being loose in the world. So, I try to do a little bit of research, just so that I can feel like I'm grounded, but then I try to bring as much of my human understanding that I can, under the filter of it being 1865.

I know I'm supposed to say this, but I really, genuinely think Matt Damon is a great dude.

I never thought I'd play an orthodox Jewish man.

If you get too deep into the history, what often happens to a lot of us actors is that we become stilted. We forget that we're reading about something that happened a hundred years ago. If we don't put the human emotion that would naturally be in there, we end up being stilted instead of being human beings.

Once you get my snark going, I'll just start snarking it up all over Twitter.

Our next black president, I think, can be more like Muhammad Ali.

I'd never thought about acting as a job. I was an engineer; I was in science and technology. I loved movies and television growing up, but I'd never thought about it as, 'Oh, that guy Denzel Washington is employed as an actor.'

When you're a guest star on a movie or a TV show, I always say it's like being invited to a family reunion, but it's not your family. So you don't belong - they're being nice to you, but you don't fit in completely; you don't know everybody's story. You don't have a history.