I think it's generally true criminal competence ultimately comes down to longevity and percentage of life lived outside prison. As a career option it's a hard sell when the best case scenario is making it to an impoverished dotage.

Good call. Definite correlation there, I think.

There's a name for this! I just always thought of it as the wrong people getting all the self-confidence…AKA the "American Idol Paradox". The inverse being equally true, namely that the most gifted tend to suffer most of the self-doubt.

Just clicked back and saw this interview - thank you!!! I'm an actor professionally and Frank Langella is one of my very few true inspirations. Maybe because he just keeps getting better and better and better.

I was with you until you discounted the role self-identity plays by reducing complex humans to a cock/snatch dichotomy. Please believe this: Our plumbing is not the final or even second to final word on who we happen to be.

Being a public figure means keeping a healthy perspective in which that healthy perspective is downright cynical. Because audiences are impossibly fickle and their expectations are as unrealistic as the image fed back to them. It's Kabuki Theatre at its finest. Great observations as to the complexity of the…

Yeah, I used to work in futures at CBOT. All those guys populating Axe Capital are very reasonable facsimiles of the people I knew either on the trading floor or upstairs. I too have been really impressed and hugely entertained, particularly this season. The writing has outdone itself. Totally agree that the…

As a (former) Chicagoan I just had to come back to support 100% any comparisons made between Axe and MJ. People couldn't believe it all those years when I'd talk about how successfully Jordan hid his actual personality from a public convinced his image was close to who the real guy is.

Exactly. And this is the message he has been putting out with the vacation pics as well: RETIRED, BITCHES!!

Yes, this is the gaping seismic distinction: THE MAN IS OUT OF OFFICE.

There goes Bambi playing the race card again. So what if the sky is blue, purple, green, or Polka dotted. In America we have a little thing called WORK. But in CHICAGO or HOLLYWOOD the sky just sits back and takes HANDOUTS. That's ok, sky. Bambi HUSSEIN Obummer will STEAL my paycheck so all your cloud buddies can just…

"Still…"

Per my post above, this is a wonderful beat for illustrating points of connection between actor and character. Is Gabriel describing the bad old glorious days of revolutionary struggle…or is it young starving actor Langella on another cattle-call audition?

This is a really terrific question because it goes to the heart of what (great) actors really do. They connect, they attach.

Who are those lemmings on the plane with her (they)? I don't remember Axe promising enabling sycophants. Just good safe transportation to go along with the real bonanza - his not disapproval.

Dude, he's Axe. A yearly milestone is what he calls Tuesday. Axe once bought Christmas just to fire it. He's Axe, man. So… watch it.

Playing designated roles, I think, is the most comprehensive way to look at Axe's relationships. He even muses on about the tent poles and linens holding up the elaborate theatrical facade of his existence. And of those whose existence is appropriated, dictated, and ultimately consumed and discarded by Axe.

But rich 50 can easily look 40. And to keep using the word 'milestone' so deliberately makes me think that a half-century is the only milestone worthy of its usage.

Yes, definitely. The pace is more deliberate and the mood puts me in mind of late-era Sopranos - that sense that everyone is dead or dying, only they don't yet know it.

Yeah, the Russian casting is particularly strong on this show. They're all powerhouses in their ways. I really really miss Arkady. Can't recall his name but the actor was ten different kinds of interesting. I couldn't ever take my eyes off of him.