“I was a strange child, and so I think I had read, by the time I was 12 or 13, almost all of the most horrific stories: ‘Pit and the Pendulum,’ ‘Hop Frog,’ ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ ‘The Black Cat.’ I also was in love with Vincent Price at the time, so that gives you some context,” O’Hare said. “I didn’t know Poe — by his literary criticism. I didn’t know about how well-embedded he was in the actual world of literature and magazines at the time. I did know about a lot of his poetry, and oddly enough, I didn’t know “The Raven.’ I knew ‘Annabel Lee’ because it was such a beautiful poem and so rhythmic.”

O’Hare said he came away from “Buried Alive” respecting Poe’s fierce intelligence and his keen sense of literary analysis. To prepare to play Poe, O’Hare said he didn’t follow his typical path of over-researching a character.

“You can’t really over-research with him because you don’t get a consistent character, but as a friend of mine always said, ‘Human beings aren’t consistent; only characters are consistent,’ ” O’Hare said. “He’s a wonderfully complicated, contradictory person, and I remember a section where he was invited to a drawing room party in New York because he was such an amazing guest. He would come. He was courtly. He was polite. He wouldn’t bore anybody. He was charismatic.