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.
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.
I have always said about myself I am a survivor because I am.
I knew how intense it was going to be. But as we started to make it - the first year - even crew people would say weird things to me.
I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.
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.
I went through a divorce right as we were starting the show. My divorce became final right after we started shooting the first year, and during that time I was in such a low place.
I would say that playing this character has caused me to think about a lot of things. He's always questioning himself and trying to get back to something he lost touch with and trying to find forgiveness. Everybody struggles with these things to some extent in their life.
It's definitely intense to walk away from at the end of each season.
The characters on the show don't have that many redeeming qualities. But Beecher is somehow seen as this sympathetic character.
What I think is great about the relationship between Keller and Beecher, and what seems to be what people feel about it in the world (at least the people who decide they want to talk to me about it) is they look at it like a relationship.
What it made me realize was that a show like this makes people look inside themselves. Because this crew guy isn't sitting there wishing the character would fight back. He's hoping that he would fight back.
Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear.
Lee's first wife, Tanya Lewis, appeared with him on an episode of Weird Science
Lee has a tattoo on the back of his right calf. It's the Japanese symbol for "mother," written inside a sun.
Lee's height is 6' (1.83 m).
Lee lost all feeling in his index fingers after repeatedly banging his hands on prisons bars in his first scene as Tobias Beecher on Oz.
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