Michael Emerson

Distinctive voice
Frequently works with wife Carrie Preston (e.g. mother and son in 'Lost' (though not in the same scenes), doomed fiances in 'Person of Interest', neighbors in 'Ready? OK!', and numerous appearances together on stage).

Did not start acting professionally until he was 32 years old.
Worked as a freelance illustrator for publications like The Boston Globe and The New York Times.
Michael Emerson met his now-wife, Carrie Preston, during the mid-1990s, when they both appeared in a production of "Hamlet" at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Preston played "Ophelia" and Emerson played "Guildenstern" in the production.
Worked as a Drama teacher before acting and briefly considered staying with it.
Did not have his first starring role in a play until he was 43 years old.

I've had the blessing of doing classic plays on Broadway, which was one of my great dreams forever.
It worries me a little bit the reach and power of TV. More people saw me in The Practice (1997) than will ever see me in all the stage plays I ever do. Which is sort of humbling. Or troubling. Or both.
[about doing Unfaithful (2002)] You work four days, and then one line is left when you see it. Demoralizing.
A better question might be what is it about those characters that appeals to audiences, or an even better question is why do audiences perceive them as creepy? Let's say I got to the studio one day and I play it in neutral - I don't make any judgment about the character or the material or anything. And then when it comes out and it's all chopped together and there's music and stuff, people go 'my God that's scary!' But I don't know what the scary element is. I don't know if it's something in me. I don't know if it's in the playing of it or the perceiving of it. It's an interesting issue, though. - asked why he's drawn to playing "creepy" characters
[on 'Person of Interest'] When the NSA story broke I thought 'Oh, wow, now real events have caught up with us'. It's double-edged, though, because now we're very topical and the writers can no longer write it from the point-of-view of it being fiction. In a real way, the world has forced itself on us. And now the real world has to be incorporated into our stories in more subtle ways - because of what the audience now knows.