Television's brightest new star remembers an early jolt of culture shock when his family moved to Sewickley Heights.
"We were sitting in our living room surrounded by packing boxes, fresh off the boat from Brooklyn, when all of a sudden the hunt comes galloping through our back yard," Wentworth Miller said. "It was a fox hunt, with red coats, dogs and everything."
Miller, 33, sometimes finds himself missing the pastoral sights of Sewickley Heights as he whittles away long hours in an Illinois prison filming Fox's hit Monday night thriller "Prison Break."
"I've been behind bars 24-7," he said, offering that as an excuse for why he's not romantically involved. "No, I'm still on the market," said the strikingly handsome 6-footer. "Sad to say, but I haven't had time to find anyone."
That wasn't always the case for the 1990 Quaker Valley graduate, who had plenty of downtime between failed acting auditions.
"There were times when I'd be sifting through my CD collection, seeing what I was willing to hock because I didn't have any work," Miller says.
Now he's co-starring in two Mariah Carey videos, and his face is all over magazines.
Only to outsiders has Miller's rise to fame been meteoric.
"They say every overnight success in Hollywood has been 10 years in the making," Miller said.
"It's been a slow climb for me, from small roles to guest-starring roles to recurring roles to movies every once in awhile and then to 'Prison Break.' "
He launched his career on the WB network, with stints on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Popular" before landing a guest role in an October 2000 episode of NBC's top-rated "ER," which catapulted him to a co-starring role in the ABC miniseries "Dinotopia."
Miller's career seemed primed to explode in 2003 when Rolling Stone magazine hailed him as Hollywood's hottest new actor based on his work alongside Nicole Kidman and Sir Anthony Hopkins in "The Human Stain."
But the movie "came and went without a trace," Miller said, which he attributes to a complicated plot and marketing campaign "that seemed to spin it into a psychological sexual thriller, which it wasn't."
With movie roles eluding him, he returned to the small-screen and a guest role on CBS's "Joan of Arcadia," before hearing about "Prison Break," which "had one of the best scripts I had read in a long time."
He auditioned and earned the coveted role of Michael Scofield, who robs a bank to get thrown into a prison so he can rescue his brother who was framed for a murder and put on death row. Scofield, an architect, designed the prison, and has its schematics tattooed on his body as a blueprint to hatch their escape.
Though conceding the "Prison Break" plot is widely implausible, TV critics have heaped praise on Miller's steely cool portrayal of a man who will risk it all for brotherly love.
TV Guide and other entertainment magazines have run sizable profiles of Miller, and though he's buffered from the paparazzi by being based in Chicago, people now recognize him when he walks down the street.
"The attention has been a little strange, but fortunately there's a healthy disconnect between myself and the person who looks like me staring up from magazines and newspaper clippings."
One of his first newspaper clippings came on Dec. 29, 1991, when the then-19-year-old English literature student at Princeton was stirring up Sewickley-ites with his cartoons.
Miller had illustrated a book "Sewickleyness" that poked fun at his new home's stuffy reputation. Written by his father, Wentworth Miller II, "Sewickleyness" included cartoons like "Garden Club Tea," which showed three upper crust Sewickley women carrying on a conversation with a neighbor to the northwest. The caption: "So my dear, I understand you live in Ambridge. Um, may I offer you a beer?"
The Millers hoped their book would gently and humorously deflate stereotypes.
"Some people found the book to be hilarious, others weren't so enthused," said Miller, who said the project was rewarding to him because it let him spend quality time with his father, who now lives in Moon Township and was one of the plaintiffs who in 1995 won a class-action lawsuit that led to Allegheny County revamping its property reassessment system.
Self-employed as a legal seminar instructor, the elder Miller and his wife sought their son's advice before uprooting the family from Brooklyn to suburban Pittsburgh.
"It was right before my senior year, and so they asked me if I would mind," Miller said. "I'm sure if I would have minded they would have waited, but I was curious to see how what I thought would be the other half - the suburban half as opposed to the urban half - lived," Miller said.
Once his culture shock subsided, Miller enjoyed and benefited from the move.
"In Brooklyn, your community is limited to blocks," Miller said. "You have these blocks where you live, and have block parties, but if you move one block over you're in a different universe.
"But in Sewickley, the entire town functions as a community, and I found that very positive," Miller said. "On the flip side, there are always people keeping an eye on how tall the grass is in your front yard," he said with one of the frequent laughs punctuating his phone interview.
For his lone year at Quaker Valley, he delved in extracurricular activities, like the senior yearbook, a literary magazine and the Quaker Quill newspaper.
"Lots of opportunities to pad the resume," Miller said.
The future Hollywood star was a mere chorus member in Quaker Valley's production of "Lil' Abner," as the acting bug didn't fully bite until he attended Princeton.
Asked if any part of his Quaker Valley experience put him on his successful path, Miller credited the high school's advanced placement English teacher, Shirley Stevens, who retired in 2001 after a 40-year teaching career.
"She was all business and expected the best from us like no other teacher I had up to that point," Miller said.
In his school days, he answered to Wentworth Miller III, though for professional reasons he dropped the "III."
" 'Wentworth' is a heavy enough name, don't you think?" he said.
It's now a household name thanks to "Prison Break," which drew 12 million viewers to last Monday's season-ending cliffhanger.
If he ever escapes the Joliet (Ill.) Correctional Center, where "Prison Break" is filmed, Miller said he's likely to make another return visit to Sewickley, where of all things he misses Bruegger's Bagels Bakery on Beaver Street.
"They have the best soup there," he said.
Ink sane
He's got enough tattoos to make Tommy Lee go, whoa!
Granted, those aren't real tattoos covering Wentworth Miller's torso and arms.
The actor undergoes four hours of makeup work per episode to get his make-believe body suit of ink.
"I keep telling myself it's such a great special effect that it's worth the time and effort," Miller said in a USA Today interview. "It could be worse. If this were 'Star Trek' I could be wearing some prosthetic headpiece 14 hours a day."
The blue-green tattoo was designed by Tom Berg of SoCal Tattoo, and turned into a series of decals that are applied to Miller's body. The decals are sprayed, sealed with an adhesive then peeled off. In a New York Times article, Miller said that for two hours of the process he must stand with his arms raised above his head. He wears the artwork home, but before going to bed he scrubs it off with solvents to avoid sticking to the sheets.
When Wentworth Miller needs inspiration for his character on Fox's "Prison Break," he just takes a look at the fortresslike limestone walls surrounding him.
There's nothing made-for-TV about them. Much of the adventure-drama about a man, played by Miller, trying to break his wrongfully convicted brother out of prison is filmed at the Joliet Correctional Center.
The prison, which was built mostly by convict labor in the 1850s, last held inmates in 2002. But the claustrophobic cells, rusty steel bars, guards' turrets, and stone floor engravings with sayings such as "It's never too late to mend," imbue the complex with an atmosphere the actors describe as haunting, ominous and depressing.
"The prison helps a great deal in keeping me grounded in the character," said Miller, whose Michael Scofield character is a structural engineer with the prison's blueprints tattooed all over his body. "When you're surrounded by 3-foot thick walls, you really understand how impossible his task is."
The show (9 p.m. EST Mondays) does require some dramatic license.
Viewers recently learned the vice president of the United States is involved in a violent conspiracy to ensure Scofield's brother Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) is executed for a crime he insists he did not commit, the murder of the vice president's brother.
Miller's character holds up a bank to get himself incarcerated at the fictional Fox River State Penitentiary alongside his brother, who is scheduled to be executed within months.
There, he struggles to perform his elaborate breakout plan while wrestling with the hazards of prison life psychotic inmates, riots and this being TV, a budding romance with the prison's comely doctor who also happens to be the governor's daughter.
While almost all of the early shooting was done at the prison, about half of its scenes are now shot in Chicago about 45 miles to the north either on a soundstage or on location for non-inmate characters. The sets were built to mimic the prison's tiny, spartan cells.
The show still relies on the former prison for shots in the infirmary, the chapel, various sheds, solitary confinement and outdoors. The yard, where much of the prisoner interaction on the show takes place, is surrounded by 12-foot fences topped with menacing barbed wire, and an old sign warns prisoners they will be shot if they approach incoming helicopters.
Producer Garry Brown said the show's creators searched the country for a prison and were wowed to find one that was vacant, open for shooting and featuring such beautiful-yet-forboeding Victorian architecture.
The Joliet prison is not unknown to film-location scouts it was featured in the opening of "The Blues Brothers," and the new feature film "Derailed," starring Clive Owen and Jennifer Aniston, was filmed there last year.
For its starring role in "Prison Break," little was needed to transform the site except adding more dirt and grime.
Behind the scenes, however, changes abound.
The prison's old shower building where signs inform prisoners they have 15 minutes before the water is turned off now houses the set's snack room, with tables laden with fruit, candy, nuts and beverages.
A cook grills hamburgers for the staff and actors out near the prison's massive gate, or sally port, where a trench was used by guards to check underneath vehicles for contraband. And holes in fences, once a major security breach, now allow actors to take short cuts across the massive complex.
Despite the freedom the actors have on-set, Amaury Nolasco who plays Scofield's cellmate said he welcomes the chance to shed his blue prison jumpsuit at the end of the day and enjoy the comforts of home. He said he often passes cells and wonders about the men who occupied them and their ultimate fates.
"The minute you walk in you feel this energy and this cloud of all the spirits that are probably going by," Nolasco said. "The prison is a character in itself. It's there. You have to acknowledge it. It's an ensemble cast including the prison."
11/12/2005
The following article appeared in the November 14, 2005 issue of Tv Guide Magazine
Wentworth Miller is deeply grateful to the producers of FX's "Nip/Tuck" and HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - especially Larry David. Remote control firmly in hand, Mr. Miller, the star of Fox's most promising new drama, "Prison Break," uses the two shows to distract himself in the makeup trailer for the four long hours he is required to remain motionless while having an intricate fake tattoo applied to his arms and torso.
Mr. Miller, 33, plays Michael Scofield, who robs a bank and gets intentionally sent to the penitentiary in order to rescue his brother, who is on death row and wrongly accused of killing the vice president's brother. Scofield's mission is to free his brother, and for that, the elaborate body art is essential. Designed by the renowned tattoo artist Tom Berg (who also did the tattoo design for the film "Red Dragon" in 2002), its complex detail hides crucial pieces of information, including names, numbers and maps embedded in the design. "In the background, there are stained-glass windows with lots of right angles that form the blueprints of the prison," Paul Scheuring, the creator and executive producer of "Prison Break," said in a telephone interview from his Los Angeles production office.
To create the intricate design, a puzzlelike series of blue-green decals is applied, sprayed, peeled off and then sealed with glue to protect the design. For two hours of the four-hourlong application process, when they are working on his torso, Mr. Miller has to stand with his arms above his head. "I'm not gonna lie," he said in a telephone interview from Chicago, where a new episode is filmed every eight working days, "it's a tedious process. Mercifully, we only have to do the full torso once per episode."
The first time the decals were applied, Mr. Miller said, he was "thrilled - it felt like you were a walking work of art." Indeed, there is a beautiful ascension of angels up the right arm and another of devils up the left arm, signifying, Mr. Scheuring said, the battle between good and evil. But the thrill soon faded when Mr. Miller discovered that this artwork is sticky. "It's like wearing flypaper," he said. "And when the weather heats up, your shirt will stick to you like Saran Wrap." He said he usually takes the decals off "at the end of the day, scrubbing them off with solvents. Because if I didn't, I'd stick to the sheets at night."
It's probably a good thing "Prison Break's" Wentworth Miller isn't a method actor.
Otherwise, those would be real tattoos covering his character's arms and body from the collarbone to his waist - front and back.
Instead, as inmate Michael Scofield, Miller's basically wearing an "adult version" of the tattoo transfers you'd find at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box, according to Mike Mekash of Tinsley Transfers, which makes and applies the "tattoos."
The body art is one of the central elements on Fox's drama, which returns at 9 tonight after a two-week baseball-playoffs-induced absence.
Scofield, a structural engineer, wants to help his brother, Lincoln Burrows, who he believes has been wrongly placed on death row for murdering the vice president's brother. He opts for a unique plan to spring Lincoln: Rob a bank, making sure to be arrested; plead guilty; get sentenced to the same prison his brother's in; and then break them out with the help of the tattoos, which contain the prison's blueprints.
The tattoos are more than just a schematic, says Tom Berg of SoCal Tattoo, who designed them. In addition to the hidden map, the right arm has angels and the left has devils. On Scofield's chest, a devil is killing an angel; it's reversed on the back. "It's a yin-yang effect," Berg says.
This was the most intricate design Berg had to come up with in the years he's worked with executive producer Brett Ratner, a film director whose credits include "Red Dragon" and the upcoming "X-Men 3."
The process of getting Berg's hand-drawn designs to Miller's body is almost as intricate as the tattoos themselves.
Once Berg's drawings are approved by the producers (some details change from episode to episode to fit the plot), he e-mails them to Mekash, who makes them into transfers, which will last for multiple days of shooting. Mekash usually makes a body mold of an actor before creating a transfer, to ensure proper fit; but because this was initially a rush job, he just measured Miller and "winged it." Photos of Miller were dropped into PhotoShop and matched with Berg's design.
The transfers, which are paper, are placed on the skin, and water is rubbed on the back. Unlike a simple Cracker Jack transfer, these are covering all the twists and turns of the body. "It's like trying to wrap a piece of paper around a basketball," Mekash says.
Because the design is so elaborate, there are four transfers for each arm and 17 for the body. How many pieces Miller wears at any time depends on what type of shirt (if any) he's wearing in the scene. Before application, the skin is cleaned with alcohol and then the transfers are placed, a process than can take 4½ to 5 hours.
"I've gotten as used to the application process as one can," Miller says. "Having a distraction helps. We've got a little TV in the make-up trailer and we watch DVDs. We're working our way through 'Nip/Tuck' and 'Curb Your Enthusiasm.' It helps pass the time."
Miller doesn't necessarily agree with Mekash's assessment that the transfer is "like wearing a second skin."
"The tattoo feels like you're wearing flypaper. We try to scrub it off at night before I go home, because otherwise I'll stick to the sheets," Miller says.
Still, that's better than being stuck by a lot of needles. To get that amount of tattoo work for real would take four years on average, according to Berg, and would require 30 to 40 hours for the front, 30 to 40 for the back and an additional 30 to 40 for each arm. If someone was on a "mission," like Scofield, it could be done in six months, Berg estimated, if "you worked every day. Most people would get needle-shy, and the pain would be too overwhelming after awhile."
Miller gets the benefit of the look without the pain.
"I get mixed reactions when I wear the tattoo out in public," Miller says. "Teenagers stare and little old ladies make room for me in elevators. I think it makes me look tougher than I am - and believe me, I need all the help I can get."
10/17/2005
The following item appeared in the October 17, 2005 issue of Tv Guide
The following article appeared in the October 2, 2005 issue of Tv Guide
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - The son of a Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Princeton, majored in English lit - but, alas, Wentworth Miller went wrong anyway.
He became an actor.
Miller had already spent two years toiling at Border's Bookstore and trying to find work behind the camera. "Just average minimum wage, wearing a tie and a name tag behind the counter," he says at a secluded table in the business center of a hotel here.
"I was raised with a certain work ethic. If you're going to do a job, do it well and no half-(way) measures. I was the best temp I could be and the best book clerk I could be."
Still all that preparation went to waste when Miller decided, once and for all, to be an actor.
"I was looking at my CD collection every month to see what I wouldn't mind hocking to pay the rent. And I realized I needed acting like I needed air and couldn't walk away from it," says Miller, his long fingers caressing the air as the talks.
"... I value the experience I did have behind that desk because to make it in this business, you need the soul of an artist but the pulse of a bureaucrat. If you're waiting tables, waiting for your break, and you're not willing to come home every night after a long shift at the restaurant and stuff your head-shots and resumes into envelopes to send out to agents and managers, you're not going to make it. It's not going to happen for you."
It's happened for Miller - twice. The first big break was when he played Anthony Hopkins as a young man in "The Human Stain." The second is his new role as the engineer who has himself arrested in order to spring his brother, an inmate on death row, in "Prison Break," premiering on Fox Aug. 29.
It doesn't seem an accident that Miller would play a meticulous and analytical engineer. He grew up that way. "I remember my father saying one word to me as I would walk out to school every day : 'increments.' Every test, every quiz, every conversation with the teacher, it all added up to the final grade, which would affect where you went off to college and the rest of your life. All those little bits and pieces added up to something larger," says Miller who's dressed in a Prussian blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, Levi's and ochre-colored loafers.
"That is very true for any walk of life, and very true for my character in 'Prison Breaks' because he's a structural engineer. I did a little bit of reading about that. And structural engineering is the art and science of connectivity. The pieces of a building are all interdependent. My brother in the story is behind the wall and every brick in that wall represents the conspiracy that put him there. My job as his brother and as an engineer is to find that one brick and loosen it. And another and another and hopefully the whole thing will come down."
Miller's resume now adds up to 14 major projects ranging from a recurring role on "Joan of Arcadia," top spots on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Dinotopia," "Popular." But he's navigated 500 auditions.
It wasn't a job that changed his fortune, it was a change in attitude, he says. "What I realized was that it's very easy in this business to be a young Tom Cruise or a young Tom Hanks. People know what to do with you because they look at you and say, 'Ahhhh, a young Tom Hanks. This has already worked so well it'll work even better this time ...'
"It's another thing to be a little bit off the beaten path because what that means is you have to go out and create something that wasn't there before."
Miller, 33, says he learned a valuable lesson about that from Hopkins. "I realized the difference between most actors and Anthony Hopkins is that most actors won't make choices about a character. There's nothing better than reading a script and getting a vision of who this character might be, how fun it would be to play and how you'll dress and how you'll walk and how you'll eat and talk and all those things," he says.
"Most actors make all those choices - or as many as possible - but they do it with a question mark when they walk into an audition and there's that subtext: 'Is this right?' 'Do you like me?' 'Is this working?' And that defeats them in the end.
"Whereas Anthony Hopkins, when he makes a choice, makes it with a period or even an exclamation mark. That shift in attitude was critical in really helping me make the most of my audition experience."
Miller, who's neither married nor has a sweetheart, says he's cautious about dating actresses. "My rule is you want someone who's got both feet on the ground. An ideal girlfriend might be someone who works in the business and can understand what you're going through but is not an actor themselves - is willing to run lines with you but when you start acting crazy, they throw up their hands and take you for what you are and be accepting."
NEW YORK If you think the average job interview is nerve-wracking, just imagine what newbie Wentworth Miller went through in his quest to play the young Anthony Hopkins in The Human Stain.
First, Miller rented every movie Hopkins had ever done so he could "steal little parts of his performances and layer them into mine." And then, he met with Hopkins for the first of several casual confabs to discuss their joint role as the young and then septuagenarian Coleman Silk, an African-American man who passes himself off as white. The drama opens in theaters on Friday.
"We had lunch in Los Angeles and I was nervous as hell," recalls Miller. "I'm having crab cakes with Hannibal Lecter! The first 10 minutes, it wasn't a conversation. It was Anthony Hopkins talking and me scrambling to come up with something witty and profound to say."
In fact, Hopkins proved to be funny and gracious. And now, the very articulate Miller, 31, has plenty to say about what could well be his breakthrough role, shot in four weeks a year and a half ago. The racially ambiguous-looking son of an African-American father and a white mother, Miller can distantly understand Silk's decision to deny his race and pass as a Jewish classics professor well into his 70s.
"I was aware that I was bringing a degree of authenticity to the table, but to be clear, passing is something that has never crossed my mind," he says. "But I know what it's like to be between two communities."
Miller grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, long before it became the chichi hipster enclave it is today. While riding the bus or hanging out in his neighborhood, he "rubbed elbows with just about everybody of every ethnicity." It wasn't until he arrived at Princeton University, where he majored in English literature, that he "started to think about racial identity in very specific terms. When it comes time to check that box, I would check mixed race, because it's true."
Now that he's played the skin game in The Human Stain, Miller plans to return to L.A., where he's lived for the past eight years, and make the rounds to audition for other projects. So far, he's had small roles on the WB's short-lived teen dramedy Popular, the 2002 mini-series Dinotopia and in this year's vampire thriller Underworld. Miller still takes regular acting classes and in his free time, the Scrabble freak has dinners with friends rather than hitting the Hollywood party scene. He remains "as single as the day is long."
Interestingly, Miller toiled away for four years as a temp in the same building where his Stain audition was held. Rather than waiting tables post-college, the wannabe actor had worked as an anonymous assistant at several major studios. The moral here, he laughs, is to be nice to your lowly underlings, because you never know when they'll end up starring in a major studio flick or having some serious financial scoop on you.
"I actually spent four months writing out contracts for other actors, so I can give you a ballpark on what many of them make," he grins. "This was a way to keep my foot in the door. It's really made me appreciate things, now that there's a little bit of momentum to my career."
In introducing Wentworth Miller, a Princeton scholar with a degree in English, a man blessed with looks, bearing, talent, brains and youth -- and a struggling actor who has made the most of a costarring role in "The Human Stain" -- we have to reveal a major plot twist of the movie.
Never mind that the secret is given away in the TV commercials and trailers and in a number of fall previews where the film's synopsis inevitably begin with variations on "In this adaptation of the Philip Roth novel, Anthony Hopkins plays a classics professor who has spent his life passing for white . . . "
"Yes, it's something of a dilemma, isn't it?" says Miller, who plays Coleman Silk, the young version of the Hopkins character, in the film's flashbacks. Miller was in Detroit last month to talk about "The Human Stain," which opens Friday. "The book and the film are both about a lot more than 'passing,' so it's not as if we're ruining it. But the story might have a little more impact if that element wasn't an open secret."
Miller, 31, speaks like that, in complete sentences and considered thoughts, a skill even rarer than you might think in young Hollywood. But he says that although he moved there to pursue his dream, he has never really felt he's part of the city or any of its scenes.
"I've probably been too focused on the work, on finding my place," he says between bites at the Townsend Hotel's restaurant. "I tend to take things too seriously, and that sets me apart."
When I met Miller, I had yet to read Rolling Stone's annual hot issue, which featured him as the Hot Newcomer, and labeled him "exotic." So I was unaware of Miller's ethnicity, which he says "is too complex to really define."
"The short version is that my father has black skin and my mother has white skin," he says. "Expanded on, he's African-American, Jamaican, English and German. She's French, Dutch, Syrian and Lebanese. I was born in England, where my father was studying as a Rhodes scholar. But mostly, we're from Brooklyn."
When Miller's agent heard the producers of "The Human Stain" were looking for someone to play young Silk, she arranged an audition, and Miller, knowing someone would undoubtedly doubt his heritage, took along a family album to prove it. As it happened, director Robert Benton was less concerned with the color gradation of Miller's skin than his ability to evoke empathy from an audience that would be understandably disdainful when he makes the decision to check the Caucasian box on his Navy entry papers.
"It's a difficult role to act," says Benton, "because you're asking an audience to understand why Coleman does what he does, without begging their sympathy, because Silk isn't a man who begs anything from anyone."
"The Human Stain" was the third novel in Roth's trilogy exploring American culture and politics through his fictional alter ago, novelist Nathan Zuckerman, played in the film by Gary Sinise. It's about an esteemed Ivy League classics professor, presumed to be Jewish, who is compelled to resign after he refers to two students who have failed to attend any of his classes as "spooks," not realizing they are African American. In his unhappy retirement, Silk surprises even himself by having a rejuvenating affair with a chain-smoking hard-knocks graduate, a cleaning woman played by Nicole Kidman.
"When I auditioned, I didn't know Tony" -- as Sir Anthony prefers to be called -- "had been cast," says Miller. "So when they finally told me I had the job, I ran directly to the video store and rented every Hopkins movie they had. I really just wanted to take a measure of how he carried himself, his style, his voice patterns. You think you know what type of actor he is until you watch all these films back to back, and you see all these subtle variations of tone and style.
"Of course, I had no scenes with him, but I was there when he came out of wardrobe on his first day of shooting, and he has these green contacts in his eyes, and a mole painted on the side of his face, just like mine. And he had studied my speech patterns in the scenes I had done, to match that. I was flattered, to say the least."
Miller's parents met at Yale; his father became an assistant district attorney in New York, while his mother taught special education. When Miller was a teenager, his father started a new career, developing a course designed to help law students prepare for essay exams. Partly to get the family out of what Miller calls "an environment that was getting rougher, especially for my younger sisters," his father and mother decided to move to a Pittsburgh suburb, where he thrived socially and educationally.
Miller had been acting in school plays since kindergarten and loved it. But after graduating from Princeton, he moved to Los Angeles with the idea of becoming an executive in the entertainment business. After three years of reading scripts and fetching coffee at NBC's made-for-TV movie division, Miller decided to give acting a real shot: He soon scored roles in the miniseries "Dinotopia" and on "E.R." and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
"The Human Stain" is his first major film role; after it was completed, he landed a role in the techno-horror movie "Underworld," playing a villain with an accent that owes more than a bit to Peter Lorre.
"It's hard to say what happens now," says Miller. "There obviously aren't going to be any more roles about black men pretending to be white. The truth is, I never identified with one race more than the other until I went to college, which is where everybody starts figuring out who and what they are. But I go by Toni Morrison's statement in 'Beloved,' when she says that definitions are to make life easier for the definer, not the defined.
"I'm hoping that what I am or what I'm not ethnically doesn't limit me in anyone else's eyes. I guarantee you it doesn't in mine."
The following item appeared in the October 2003 issue of Movieline's Hollywood Life Magazine
The following item appeared in the October 2003 issue of InStyle Magazine
The following article appeared in the November 10, 2003 issue of People Magazine
