Secondary to Midge, I feel like Abe has the most fleshed-out character arc. I was wondering if—

That's because of your uncle.

Ha, maybe. Although, actually, Abe reminds me a lot of my dad.

That's interesting, because he reminds me of my dad, too, in a lot of ways.

I was going to ask you if you draw parts of him from any father figures you know.

I draw from my dad and also because when I was young, it was in this period. And so I could easily relate to how men and fathers navigated the world and their children. And finding that balance between being the patriarch and having authority and wanting your children to be autonomous and stand up for themselves, my dad was like that.

You grew up ninth of ten children in a Lebanese-American family in Wisconsin. When did you realize you wanted to be an actor? Did your family dynamic lead you toward that path at all?

I think it was part of our dynamic. There were a lot of us, so we always had a built-in audience. And we found ourselves entertaining each other. We didn't have a television for maybe the first eight or ten years of my life. I think my father, he didn't want that in the house. He finally broke down.

Did he like it once he broke down?

No, because before we had television, when he would come home from work we would all just run to him and swarm him. And then, after we got TV, he would come home from work and we were just glued to the set. He felt like, “It's over for me.” And so I'm not sure he was a fan.

Over the course of your career—and I think this is rare for any actor, but especially for actors with an Arab background—you’ve avoided getting typecast. Is that something that you consciously went out of your way to avoid?

Well, yeah. At a certain point I did. And part of it is a function of having been trained in the theater, and when I was at the Yale drama school, the main emphasis of that program was on playing characters and transforming and not necessarily always playing things as close to your own type.

I was what you would call a character actor at a very early stage in my career, as opposed to a leading man.

Were there any attempts early in your film and TV career to pigeonhole you into that space? Were you getting sent roles for, say, a terrorist cab driver or anything?

Well, I did do a role when I was living in New York in the ’80s and I was doing a lot of theater, but I was just starting to audition for film and television roles. The series The Equalizer, which was an hour-long drama. And I did play a terrorist on that show. And then I realized that once I had done that, I didn't need to revisit that. I didn't need to refine it or perfect it.

So after that I did make the effort to sort of sidestep those roles. But you know for actors it's not always easy, because sometimes those are the only opportunities you get. And it's a little bit of a roll of the dice to see whether that's what you're going to be known for, if that's going to stick.

You make your best choices, and then sometimes you just have to go with it because we want to work and we want to have opportunities to show what we can do. And we have to eat. He said, as he shovels food in his mouth.