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More reviews of "Snipes"
Philadelphia Inquirer review:
"Philly gangstas, moguls and nastiness
By Steven Rea
Inquirer Movie Critic

Snipes moves across a gritty Philadelphia cityscape where gangstas and rappers - and greedy record moguls - collide. A solid, suspenseful thriller with a surprising noir twist, the film, from director Rich Murray, follows a 17-year-old kid who gets tangled up in some nasty business involving stolen master tapes, kidnapping and murder. Snipes premiered at the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema in April, and is now rolling out into select markets nationwide.

Erik (Sam Jones 3d) is an ace "sniper" - a street-trooper who plasters lampposts, buildings and construction sites with posters hyping the latest local rap releases. An avid fan of newcomer Prolifik (the super-hot Nelly), Erik would rather hang out at Ill Wax Records than attend classes at Overbrook High. Then one day, he and his buddy Malik (Mpho Koaho) "borrow" the key to a recording studio - leading the two friends into a mess of trouble.

Brooding and boyish, Jones brings considerable depth to his role; it's a part that requires a mix of youthful naivete with pluck and smarts, and the actor pulls it off. Other performances range from accomplished to amateurish: Nelly and rapper Schoolly D acquit themselves well; Zoe Saldana is likable as the record-company exec who befriends Erik, while Dean Winters, from HBO's Oz, gets the thankless job of playing a loudmouthed music-biz sleaze.

With its teen protagonist and some stereotypical characters (Erik's stern, sermonizing father, for one), Snipes can occasionally come across like a too-earnest after-school TV special. But there's enough urban authenticity, and edgy suspense - not to mention beat-thumping music - to make this homegrown indie a compelling ride.

And just when you think you have Snipes pegged, watch out: It doesn't go where you expect it to, and the trip's all the better for it."




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AP review in Philadelphia Inquirer
" 'Snipes' goes from gritty to get real
Haunting Philly scenes aren't enough to make up for plot absurdities
By BEN NUCKOLS
Associated Press

Independently produced and shot at minimal expense on the bleak streets of North Philadelphia, "Snipes" promises to offer a fresh, gritty perspective on the hip-hop scene.

But once the gunfire and gangsta posturing take over, it descends into standard silliness. If little movies are the place to look for big ideas, then "Snipes" deserved a larger budget.

The title refers not to actor Wesley Snipes but to the practice of wallpapering city streets with promotional posters for upcoming albums and concerts. Erik Triggs (Sam Jones III) is an eager "sniper" for an independent record label, able to attach posters to structures as imposing as the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

With 17-year-old Erik's help, buzz about the label's emerging superstar, Prolifik, is consuming the city. But Prolifik - played by hip-hop star Nelly in an explosive screen debut - is an unreconstructed thug who's more interested in enjoying the riches of a platinum record than getting into the studio and making an album.

Erik can't exactly stay out of trouble, either. In an attempt to get some free time in front of the microphone for his best friend, a budding rapper, he swipes a key to the recording studio where Prolifik is finishing his first LP. Late one night, the two sneak inside and find the place littered with bodies.

Turns out Prolifik has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom along with the sole master tape of his album, and hotheaded label boss Bobby Starr (Dean Winters) thinks Erik and his friend are involved.

For a music-video director making his first feature, Rich Murray is remarkably restrained. He eschews visual pyrotechnics, sticking to conventional Hollywood film grammar: master shot, medium shot, close-up. It's crude but it works; some early scenes have a raw power.

When violence erupts, it's quick and nasty, never unfolding the way those who intend to inflict pain expect it to.

But Murray, who co-wrote the screenplay with Rob Wiser, can't stay on top of the escalating mayhem he has devised and makes some laughable choices in the movie's second half.

The deeper it digs into the kidnap plot, the further "Snipes" goes south, sometimes even apologizing for its own cliches.

Aside from Nelly, none of the actors makes a strong impression. Anyone who has seen the seething menace Winters brings to HBO's "Oz" will be bored by his less-subtle work as the amoral record executive.

The jury's still out on Jones, who was greener when this movie was shot nearly two years ago than he is now as a regular on the WB series "Smallville." He shows flashes of nervousness in front of the camera, but he's appealing enough as a decent kid caught up in circumstances beyond his control.

Ultimately, the film's only authenticity is visual: Murray and cinematographer Alexander Buono capture the gloomy grandeur of autumn in Philly. Their frightening images of urban decay enhance the picture's bleak perspective on the rap industry.

Murray wants to teach his young hero a lesson: Idolize a hip-hop star and you're likely to get burned when he can't deliver on the hype. But as the bullets fly and the bodies mount, his methods of instruction turn into literal overkill."

The NY Times review of Snipes

"MOVIE REVIEW | 'SNIPES'
Violence and Sentiment Waging a Hip-Hop War
By A. O. SCOTT

"Snipes," directed and partly written by Rich Murray, is a hectic, blood-soaked melodrama that traffics in the brutal, by now tired gangster mythology of hip-hop. Nelly, the rap superstar, plays an up-and-coming Philadelphia rapper who goes by the name Prolifik. His glowering image stares down from just about every wall and lamppost in the city, thanks to the efforts of an eager young fan named Erik (Sam Jones III), who works for Prolifik's shady record company, putting up promotional posters, or snipes.

As is often the case with ambitious, eager first-time filmmakers, Mr. Murray, a prolific director of music videos, stuffs his debut with more plot than it can comfortably hold. The story is a web of double crosses, hidden agendas and coincidences so intricate that every so often one character has to sit another down and, with flashbacks, explain (for the audience, too) just what is going on. Prolifik, making an uneasy transition from street criminal to recording star, is embroiled in creative and financial conflicts with Bobby Starr (Dean Winters), the owner of his record label, who is in hock to a local mobster (Frank Vincent).

Erik, a sweet, nervous kid with a friendly, credulous smile, worships Prolifik but finds himself mixed up in some dangerous business when his idol is kidnapped by gunmen during a midnight recording session. Starr, who seems to be a pretty dim fellow, decides that Erik and his chubby pal Malik (Mpho Koaho), an aspiring M.C., must be the masterminds behind the kidnapping and the theft of the master tapes for Prolifik's long-awaited debut album. Pretty soon, bodies start dropping, and Erik, after being subjected to gruesome torture by the movie-mad Starr (in a scene that flirts with the notorious ear-slicing from "Reservoir Dogs" and settles for nasal mutilation inspired by "Chinatown"), must face down assorted thugs, sharks and double-dealers, armed only with a paint-ball gun, a toilet tank cover and his wits.

At least he has some. Mr. Jones, who recently starred in "Zig-Zag," a similarly striving, overwrought picture, is a disciplined and likable performer, and he bravely perseveres in the face of narrative absurdity and rampant overacting. Mr. Winters, who plays the sociopath Ryan O'Reilly on "Oz" with a twinkle of snide mischief, raves and blusters as if begging for a spell in solitary. Zoe Saldana, as an employee of Starr who befriends Erik, struggles in a role that demands a nearly impossible combination of steeliness and vulnerability.

"Snipes," which opens today in New York, Detroit, Atlanta, Baltimore and Philadelphia, is similarly divided between amoral, ultraviolent swagger and moralistic sentiment. Some of the bloodier scenes, including a climactic shootout, aim for the grisly, stylish insouciance that has been the calling card of would-be Tarantinos for some time. But the bloody slapstick neither shocks nor surprises, and the emotional weightlessness of the many killings is ultimately repellent. ("What's with all the dead people?" Starr's gangster patron remarks before increasing their number.) The music on the excellent soundtrack, which Mr. Murray deploys with a skill that attests to his previous career, carries off the contradictions with more nerve, concision and impact than the movie, with its draggy exposition and incoherent messages.

"Snipes" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes much swearing, graphic violence and a scene, de rigueur in a hip-hop exploitation picture, that takes place in a strip club.

SNIPES

Directed by Rich Murray; written by Rob Wiser and Mr. Murray; director of photography, Alexander Buono; edited by Seth E. Anderson; music by Tony D.; production designer, David Barnes; produced by Mr. Murray and Chris Schwartz; released by RuffNation Films. Running time: 113 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Sam Jones III (Erik Triggs), Nelly (Prolifik/Clarence), Dean Winters (Bobby Starr), Zoe Saldana (Cheryl), Mpho Koaho (Malik), Rashaan Nall (Floyd) and Frank Vincent (Johnnie Marandino)."

I found this on an unofficial Oz forum-
From the St Louis Post Dispatch:
<< Nelly came to "Snipes" before becoming a star

By Kevin C. Johnson
Of The Post-Dispatch

When it came to hiring actors for the new low-budget action feature "Snipes," rapper Nelly was among the last, but not least, of the performers cast.
...
There were some who thought the director may have made one bad move by casting a real-life rapper with no acting experience. But Nelly gets high marks from his co-stars. Dean Winters, who plays shady Ill Wax Records owner/hustler Bobby Starr, has experience working with rappers. He plays convict Ryan O'Reily on HBO's "Oz," a show that has featured guest-starring rappers including Method Man, Master P and Treach. Winters just concluded filming the final season of "Oz," which begins airing in January.

Winters says his experience with rappers on Oz wasn't always good. As a result, when Murray "told me he was looking for a real rapper to play that part, I was a little nervous, like 'OK, let's see who's going to come on board and cause drama.'"

But Nelly was unassuming and professional, according to his co-star.

"He really killed it," Winters says.
... >>

It's official...
NEW YORK, April 30,2002-HBO's acclaimed prison drama OZ has begun
production on its sixth and final season, it was announced today by
Chris Albrecht, president, HBO Original Programming. The network's
first hour-long dramatic series, OZ will return to HBO with eight new
episodes in early 2003, and will have presented 56 episodes when it
completes its run.

"OZ has been a landmark series for HBO, one that has had a tremendous
impact on both subscribers and critics," noted Albrecht. "We look
forward to working with Tom Fontana again."

"With these final eight episodes of OZ, I will finish telling the
story I originally set out to tell," notes executive producer Tom
Fontana, who wrote all of the storylines and most of the scripts for
the series. "I want the series to go out at what I hope will be the
top of its form. And though it's the end of OZ, it's the beginning of
our next collaboration with HBO."

OZ chronicles the relentless struggles for power inside the Oswald
State Correctional Facility, where inmates and correctional officers
battle ruthlessly for survival amid warring factions and explosive
acts of retribution. The Hollywood Reporter praised OZ as "one of the
freshest, most solidly directed and performed and best produced
series on the tube."

Among the directors for the new season of OZ will be series veterans
Adam Bernstein and OZ director of photography Alex Zakrzewski, plus
six directors all making their episodic TV debuts, including Marc
Klasfeld, Judy Dennis, David Von Ancken, John Henry Davis, Daniel
Loflin and Ted Bogosian.

OZ debuted on HBO with eight shows in 1997 and returned for two more
seasons of eight shows apiece in 1998 and 1999. The fourth season
featured eight episodes in the summer of 2000, and eight more in
early 2001, followed by a fifth season of eight shows in early 2002.
The first season of OZ was recently released on HBO Home Video.

Interview from salon.com from Jan. 15, 2002, with Harold Pinneau, Kirk Acevedo, and Dean talking about Oz
http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/int/2002/01/15/oz/?x
The men behind the curtain
Three actors from "Oz" talk about surviving the slammer, prison politics and the brutish force of the most overlooked show on television.
By Ian Rothkerch
Jan. 15, 2002 | Despite a celebrated creator, addictive story lines and a crackling ensemble cast, "Oz" remains the bitch of network television. It's a little unfair. Writer Tom Fontana's violent, realistic drama debuted five years ago and uninitiated viewers still dismissively call it "that prison show on HBO."
Yet like this season's "24" and the prematurely defunct "Homicide: Life on the Street" (another Fontana creation), "Oz" has managed to fly low on the Nielsen radar while attracting an unshakably faithful audience attracted to the sheer ballsiness and uncompromising sophistication of the material.
Set in the fictional Oswald State Correctional Facility, "Oz" is a testosterone-drenched male soap opera centering around the inmates of "Emerald City" -- an experimental, maximum-security unit of Oswald. With its glass-enclosed cells and suffocating architecture, Em City looks and functions like a human ant farm, playing home to such motley residents as a gay serial killer, a homicidal skinhead, a Muslim writer-turned-arsonist, a junkie basketball player, a slut lawyer and an evangelical preacher played by Luke Perry.
Fontana and his writers have fashioned this merry-less land of Oz as a microcosm of humanity, using the fishbowl as a way to comment on universal politics and interpersonal protocol. Ultimately, all that really separates these convicts from the rest of us is their aptitude for murder, mind games and manipulation. That is "Oz's" singular triumph: its ability to make audiences care about the fate of people more deserving of our contempt than our compassion.
Salon recently spoke via conference call with Kirk Acevedo (who plays the psychotic, suicidal gang leader Miguel Alvarez), Harold Perrineau (the savvy, wheelchair-bound narrator Augustus Hill) and Dean Winters (crafty schemer and resident troublemaker Ryan O'Reily). "Oz" airs Sunday nights at 10 on HBO.
Tom Fontana is the driving force behind the series and has long been considered one of the best TV writers. What do you admire most about his writing?
Kirk Acevedo: What I enjoy about Tom's writing is that it's very accessible for the actors emotionally. He allows them to go certain places that you wouldn't normally be able to go on some other TV shows.
Harold Perrineau: I like Tom's writing for its simplicity and therefore its complexity. It's really, really simple writing, but profound in the sense that it speaks to everybody. Tom will deal with issues that I think a lot of writers on TV or anywhere don't want to deal with -- things that everyday people of all races and economic backgrounds have to deal with. Tom finds a way to put them all in. Even in the world of Oz, it's pretty fantastic that he can touch so many people.
Dean Winters: I like Tom's writing because it's fearless. He doesn't write the obvious material. He doesn't write the obvious endings. He doesn't write what he thinks is going to be commercially acceptable. Which is probably the one reason why he's kind of stayed in the background as far as winning awards and all that. He takes the unpopular route. I think that people who are really dialed into this business have the utmost respect for him.
Does it bother you that "Oz" doesn't receive the same recognition as fellow HBO programs like "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City?"
Winters: I think that we all feel the same way. For any of us to say that it doesn't bother us would kinda be a lie. It does bother us. I don't think the actors are necessarily looking for awards, but it would be really nice if Tom got the respect he deserves. Unfortunately, in the Hollywood way, respect comes in the form of a trophy a lot of the time.
Perrineau: If we were more recognizable, really, we wouldn't feel as cool as we do. [Everyone laughs] We actually feel like we're doing something that's worthy of being done. I don't know about anybody else, but I don't feel in any way like I'm selling out to some sort of corporate television thing for the masses. You know ... I'm representin'. [Laughs]
Winters: No doubt "Sex and The City" and "The Sopranos" are great shows ... but it's been done before. I think people are a little bit frightened of us and there might be a little hesitation to give awards. Also, because we only do eight episodes a year, we fall into a very weird category.
Did you do any kind of research in preparation for your roles? What kind of feedback have you received from the penal system?
Winters: I went out and robbed a few delis and I arsoned a couple of buildings. [Laugh] That was my research -- I can't speak for the others.
So you're a method actor then?
[Everyone laughs]
Winters: It's kinda hard to research these roles, you know.
Did you hang out in any prisons at all?
Perrineau: I went with Eamonn Walker [who plays Kareem Said] over to Riker's [Island], which is not like a regular state penitentiary but a holding cell. I actually do have a cousin who's upstate, so I would talk to him a bit. There are a few people I know who've been in and out and that's kinda all the research I did.
If you had a chance to play any other character on "Oz," who would it be and why?
Winters: Honestly, I'm not envious, but I love watching Harold in the box. I just think there's something very cool about being the "Our Town" narrator and giving people a checkup every 15 minutes to let them know what they're going through.
Acevedo: I'll have to second that. If I could switch roles, I'd probably wanna switch with that.
Winters: Because you get to sit down all day.
[Laughs]
Acevedo: There's something about the solitude of Harold's character, because we have a lot of scenes where there's like two to 20 people in one scene interacting.
Since everybody envies you, Harold, what's your choice?
Perrineau: I don't know. There's so many really interesting roles. One of the things about delivering the monologues and stuff is that it actually gets a little lonely. Sometimes I look for the interaction with the other actors. I almost wish I was playing Lee [Tergeson's] role or Christopher Meloni's because they always have each other. I'd almost do any one of them. I'd love to be O'Reily because of all the stuff he gets to do with Dr. Nathan (Lauren Velez).
While "Oz" is ostensibly a prison drama, it tackles much larger societal themes like racism, capital punishment and a corrupt political system. Has working on the show influenced the way you once thought about these subjects?
Perrineau: Absolutely not.
Winters: Think twice before you cop heroin on the street. [Laugh] Oz is in a fictional city because Tom doesn't have to follow any federal guidelines. I can't speak for these guys, but it definitely made me more aware of the penal system. A lot of that comes from the fact that we get stopped many times during the week by people that have either been in prison or who have had family in prison. They really make you aware of how horrific a place it is.
Acevedo: You would have to say that Tom's views about the penal system definitely weigh toward the left and so do mine. I think there's a theme about rehabilitation throughout the whole thing. I definitely think that in the right facility with the right programs inmates can be rehabilitated to live a normal life in society. I think Tom just leans toward that without knocking you over the head with it.
What influence does the bleak prison setting have on your work atmosphere? How would you describe the usual mood on set? Winters: Because we moved our set we're in this abandoned military base in the middle of nowhere. In the previous four years that we shot, we really weren't forced to spend time together outside the scene work and now we're completely forced to spend time together. There's no such thing as a trailer -- it's like working with a bare bones theater company. But the actual set itself is so realistic. The second you walk through those doors you really feel like you're in a prison. No exaggeration. Really the only star of the show is the prison. This year it comes glaringly through; it adds to the claustrophobia and tension. "Oz" is fascinating in its exploration of prison politics and the social hierarchy among inmates. What's the most surprising thing you've learned about life behind bars in a maximum-security facility? Perrineau: I would have to say that behind bars is no different than in front of bars. People still respond the way that people respond because of love or hate or loyalties. I used to think somehow that if you're in jail you would look different than human, but you're not. Have any of you become more active in the area of prison reform? Winters: I've definitely become more aware of the penal system and more aware of what life could be like inside a prison. But as far as becoming proactive in the community, I personally have not done anything. It's tough. What are you gonna do, you know?
Perrineau: I actually met someone who is an organizer for a group who are trying to get the Rockefeller Laws repealed. I haven't started working with them yet, but we've been in contact over the past year. So I've been looking at different groups like that because there's so many things to be done.
Winters: Barry Scheck, O.J.'s lawyer, has an organization (Project Innocence) for death row inmates who couldn't afford to go through the new DNA testing, which is freeing so many people. Basically, a bunch of rappers like Method Man and Nate Dogg got together to make an "Oz" soundtrack and all the money went to Barry Scheck's organization.
Despite the amoral nature of your characters, there's something decidedly likable about them. What's the biggest challenge in breathing humanity into these guys and making them empathetic to audiences?
Winters: I never go into a scene -- ever, ever, ever -- thinking, I have to make myself more empathetic toward the audience. Once you start doing that, you get into really dangerous territory. I think you start to become kind of untrue to the character.
Dean, you work opposite your real-life brother Scott [Cyril O'Reily]. You two have had some gut-wrenching scenes together, particularly when Cyril felt the ill effects of that experimental aging drug. Does the intensity and grimness of the material ever bleed over into your real life?
Winters: If anything, it's almost therapeutic -- it's almost like we get to work this shit out. Our relationship has gotten so much better in the last four years. We're at much different places in our lives. I mean, I've been in scenes with my brother where I've been absolutely emotionally terrified to go somewhere. But because he's my brother I feel safe.
Basically, your brother is playing someone with severe brain damage -- is it tough seeing him that way day in and day out? Winters: Brutal. There have been numerous times that Tom Fontana will tell you where I've broken down -- where I shouldn't have -- just because I'm looking at him [Scott]. It makes me sick to my stomach. You really inhabit that character. There have been times where I almost got physically sick.
Harold, in many ways Augustus Hill is the conscience of the show. He's the one person we can count on to make sense of this senseless world called Oz. Can you identify with Augustus' disillusionment and cynicism toward society?
Perrineau: I don't know that it's always disillusionment. Sometimes there is, but sometimes it's just calling it the way it is. In order to say a lot of it I really have to get in there and figure what it is he's saying. Most of it I really get and I understand. I have a part of me, and I try not to live in that part all the time, that cynical part of me that sees the world like that and wants to always call it. Augustus' role is to say something about it and then what I do in my life is to try to find things to do about it.
As the show's narrator, you get a chance to recite some really juicy dialogue. Of all the monologues you've delivered, is there any one that still sticks with you?
Perrineau: They're all really, really great monologues. I don't remember the monologue exactly, but there was one that talked about pets and people wondering about whether their pets are gonna go to heaven. It says, "Why are we wondering about our pets when pets don't do the same things that humans do? Pets don't wallow around in lies ... they just live in the truth. How amazing would that be to just live every moment in the truth?" It's really struck me in my life. I really have to look at myself all the time now and go, "Oh, I'm lying. I'm bullshittin'."
How long did it take to adjust to being in a wheelchair for so many hours? Does it ever get frustrating not being able to move around? Do you feel it inhibits your acting style at all?
Perrineau: No, I think it makes me really have to be creative. I used to be a dancer many years ago, so it's a weird poetic justice that I get one of the biggest roles of my life and I can't move the bottom half of my body. I never really get frustrated with it. You can't imagine how much I love going to work -- seriously.
Kirk, Miguel Alvarez is an extremely complex and emotionally layered individual. How do you inhabit a character who's constantly being put through the psychological ringer?
Acevedo: I have to admit, it was fun for the first two or three seasons. Then it got really difficult trying to go to that same place over and over just because the first three seasons he was put into situations that were beyond his control. As an actor, I would say those are the scenes I love to do the most because they're more challenging and I'm able to show the sympathetic side.
In one episode, your character brutally gouges the eyes of a security officer. Does the violence get to you?
Acevedo: I have to go back to what Dean said. It's totally therapeutic to let out a primal howl, an angst, through someone's writing.
How do you all respond to people who accuse "Oz" of furthering negative stereotypes about minorities?
Acevedo: We're talking about a specific group of people who have committed crimes -- whether they be white, black or Hispanic. We're not singling any groups out. In the second season, for instance, Luis Guzman tells my character he's "too white" to be part of the gang. For me personally, it's happened throughout a large part of my childhood where I went to school, in East Harlem, and everyone thought I was white when I'm Hispanic. We incorporated that into the show. But I don't really think it perpetuates stereotypes. I've never had an experience where someone accused something about the show that they thought was racism.
Perrineau: I actually had one where a black man said, "You need to stop what you're doing." And I asked him to really watch the show. Listen, it's a fact that there are a lot of minorities [in prison]. We're not making anybody bigger or smaller or anything. There's a lot of truth-telling in it. There are good people and there are bad people of all races. In "Oz," one moment you think Ryan O'Reily is the biggest dick, and the next moment you're crying your eyes out cause you see how much he loves his brother.
Who's the one inmate in Oz you don't want near you when you drop the soap?
[Everyone laughs]
Perrineau: He's gone. [Simon] Adebisi!
Winters: There hasn't really been a stand-out rapist since he left. Perrineau: Him or [Christopher] Meloni (playing serial killer Chris Keller).
Winters: Yeah, I wouldn't wanna be in the shower with Meloni. [Laugh]
What was going through your mind the first time you had to do a nude scene?
[Everyone laughs]
Winters: The first time I did the nude scene, I was, like, "Man, it's cold in here." I made sure that the second nude scene I did the temperature was turned up. Perrineau: This is a really weird thing. I read it and read it and read it [the nude scene] and didn't realize until the day I was shooting it and had to sign a waiver that I was supposed to be nude. I got that I was in the bed with my girl and I then jump out the window, and it still didn't occur to me that I have no clothes on!
Winters: Did you run out on top of the building naked?
Perrineau: I ran out on top of the building, so there were people across the way looking at the building screaming, "Whoooo!" It was a little bizarre. I went out and got thoroughly trashed that night. I was a little freaked out.
So, what do we have to look forward to on the new season of "Oz"?
Winters: I think we can say that one of the more popular cast members who left comes back. As far as my story line goes, something really horrific happens to Cyril and so I kind of spend the second half of the season taking care of my brother, and it goes horribly wrong. What survival advice do you have for any Salon reader out there who might be on his way to the big house?
Winters: Keep your mouth shut. [Laughs] Or work out and get big enough before you go in.
On a scale of one to 10, how do you rate your chances of lasting in a place like Oz for one year?
Winters: Zero.
Perrineau: I'd have to go with the old zero, too.
Acevedo: I would have to say a "1" just because I think I'd be someone's cupcake.

Another Dean interview
New York Post
STYLE & SUBSTANCE
By FARRAH WEINSTEIN
January 13, 2002 -- Dean Winters is both deranged and sexy as prisoner Ryan O'Reilly on HBO's "Oz," which is now in its fifth season. And the sarcastic, smart-ass attitude that the series' viewers love to hate is also reflected in his real-life persona. When The Post asked what research he did for the role of O'Reilly, a man sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, drug dealing and rape in the fictional Oswald State Penitentiary, he said: "It didn't take much. I went out and knocked over a deli and then torched my old boss." Right. The Manhattan-born actor moved to Arizona at a young age and attended prep school. After majoring in English at Colorado College, Winters traveled throughout the West Coast, Hong Kong and Europe before settling in New York. For eight years, he worked as a bartender all over Manhattan with his brother, Scott Winters (who also plays his brother Cyril on the TV show), while attending acting class on the side. He got his first role - at age 30 - from one of his frequent customers at the downtown bar Nevada Smith's, producer Tom Fontana. Fontana asked him if he wanted to a role in "Homicide: Life on the Street." That work led to more guest appearances, including roles on "NYPD Blue," "Millennium" and "New York Undercover." The 37-year-old blue-eyed hotshot has since been seen on "Sex and the City" and starred on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit." You can check him out in the soon-to-be-released movies "Snipes," with rapper Nelly, and "Hellraiser 6."
Q: What can we expect from this season of "Oz"?
A: Tom Fontana really found his groove - not that it was ever lost - and this season is very tight. It concentrates more on the original prisoners that came on in the first season, so you see the toll the last five years has taken on them.
Q: When not working, what do you do to relax?
A: I tend to sleep a lot.
Q: What are some of your favorite haunts in Manhattan?
A: I like to go where the music bangs, like Exit, Vinyl and Centro Fly.
Q: What can't you live without?
A: My music.
Q: How do you stay in shape?
A: New York being the greatest walking city in the world, I tend to walk everywhere, as long as I am afforded the time.
Q: How do you take care of yourself?
A: I try not to overdo it.
Q: How do you spoil yourself?
A: I work hard, so I play harder.
Q: What do you do for fun?
A: Spend as much time with friends and family as possible. And when I can, leave the city on little spur-of-the-moment adventures.
Q: Favorite food?
A: Pizza.
Q: What gives you substance?
A: New York City.
Q: Describe your personal style.
A: I'm a street chameleon.
Q: Favorite designers?
A: Jean Paul Gaultier, Giorgio Armani, Prada and Levi Strauss.
Q: What do you wear when relaxing?
A: My Levi's jeans, Royal Elastics sneakers and a Calvin Klein T-shirt.
Q: What do you wear for a big night out?
A: Whatever my girlfriend tells me to.
Q: What would you never wear?
A: Khakis, plaid, loafers or anything else that makes me look like a cookie cutter.
Q: What do you use to accessorize?
A: What does accessorize mean?
Q: Whose style do you most admire?
A: Jimi Hendrix.
Q: What would you love to own but would never buy for yourself?
A: A purple Rolls-Royce.
Q: What traits does your ideal woman have?
A: Humor, humor, humor.
Q: If you had more free time, what would you do with it?
A: Work.
Q: What don't you ever leave home without?
A: My street smarts.

A review of the movie "Snipes" from Toronto Life Magazine October 2001
By Andre Mayer
Directed by: Richard Murray Written by: Richard Murray and Rob Wiser Starring: Sam Jones III, Nelly, Dean Winters, Zoe Saldana, Dean Williams
The culture of hip hop has yielded so many flashy personalities, so much infighting and, sadly, so many deaths that it more or less cries out for cinematic interpretation. In his spotty feature-length debut, Snipes, accomplished video director Richard Murray exploits the music biz as a backdrop for one youngster's coming of age. Erik Triggs(Sam Jones III)is a good-hearted and impressionable teen who works part-time for a record company-he's a "snipe," a street marketer paid to put up posters promoting Ill Wax Records' acts around Philadelphia. His musical hero is an irascible newcomer named Prolifik (played with perfect insolence by real-life rapper Nelly); Prolifik's first album promises whopping sales, but he's having difficulty finishing it. When Erik and a friend sneak into the label's studio to score some free recording time, they discover two dead bodies and are soon implicated in a crime that includes Prolifik's abduction and the theft of his highly publicized master tapes. A young black protagonist on the cusp of adulthood, a deceptively glamorous depiction of the thug life, a dense (at times intrusive)soundtrack-Murray is clearly familiar with John Singleton's oeuvre. While it's inspired by Boyz N the Hood, Snipes has neither the rectitude nor the emotional wallop of Singleton's now-classic film-although Eric's father upbraids his son for squandering his future, he can't be arsed to get off the sofa and deliver the kind of fervid moralistic screeds Laurence Fishburne did in Boyz. It's not uplifting enough to function as a message movie, but Snipes has some merit as a crime-drama-Prolifik's kidnapping eventually reveals itself as a convoluted felony that reflects the social dimensions of inner-city life.Snipes also offers some stinging commentary about hip hop's cutthroat reputation-once Erik is suspected of harbouring Prolifik's tapes, the record company is quite literally prepared to kill to get them back. Unfortunately, Murray's critique is diluted by its facile bravado. Dean Winters (best known for his role as the meddling O'Reilly on TV's Oz) brings sneering malice to the role of ruthless label exec Bobby Starr, but his physical intensity is wasted on the script's cliched ghetto bluster. Like far too many gangsta rappers, Snipes' tough act is all posturing.

Sept. 15, 2001
NYPOST.COM Gossip: PAGE SIX By RICHARD JOHNSON with PAULA FROELICH and CHRIS WILSON
Escape to N.Y. FLIGHTS were canceled and train service was halted, but Dean Winters found a way to get back to his TriBeCa apartment from the Toronto international Film Festival to check on his friends and family. Winters, who stars on HBO's "Oz," told us: "They opened the Niagara Falls border for like an hour, and I hired a limo driver and just got back to New York as fast as I could. I know a few people that worked at the World Trade Center that I haven't gotten in touch with yet."

This is from August 3, 2001
eonline.com

Dear Marilyn: What can you tell me about Dean Winters of the HBO series Oz? I love watching him, and I rarely see anything about him in the press.
Maureen, Jensen Beach, Florida
Dear Maureen: Winters, who turned 37 on July 20, is surrounded by kin on Oz. His brother Scott is a member of the cast, and his brother Bradford is a writer for the series.
Dean was born in Manhattan and grew up on Long Island until his teen years, when his father got a job in Arizona and the family moved to Scottsdale. Dean worked as a model and a bartender before deciding--at Scott's urging--to attend acting school.
Ironically, Oz creator Tom Fontana discovered him between acting classes--while he was bartending. One thing led to another. In 1999, Dean joined the cast of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit--while continuing his role as Oz inmate Ryan O'Reilly.

An interview with one of Dean's co-stars for the Hellraiser movie, with a picture of Dean from the set.

About Undercover Angel...

From People.com-Fall Faces of 99

another article about dean

Black Book (1998 or 1999)
Thick as thieves
Blood and Talent: Two actors and a screenwriter
by Jessica Willis
It's peculiar to see Dean Winters close his eyes and let a makeup artist pat his
face with a powder puff. And when he's summoned over to the racks of Italian suits and
fedoras and slips into one of the many Armanis he will wear this morning, you realize
were just not in Oz anymore, and he is no longer Ryan O'Reilly, the cool psychopath
he plays on HBO's Oz. Its good to look nice for a change, he says. Being that I'm on
a prison show and all.
That's an understatement. If Oz is a prison show, then Valley of the Dolls is
just a paperback. The Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson-produced television serial is
set in a claustrophobic vision of purgatory: the maximum-security Oswald Penitentiary.
And since the first episode aired in August of 97, Dean, along with his brother Scott
(who also plays Dean's retarded brother on the show), have been getting Ozzed in
public on a regular basis. Everyone from soap-opera-loving housewives to young toughs
in stocking caps get in their faces and yell in amazement and fear.
To keep the filial franchise thing going, enter Brad Winters, the youngest brother,
and one of the Oz writers. Right now he's lurking around, trying to avoid the Armani
racks. He shares with his brothers the same open face and candid blue eyes, and he
certainly doesn't look like someone who would be involved in the conjuring of
pornographically grim scenes of bleeding eyeballs and crucifixion.
Its so much fucking fun, says Dean who, at 34, is the oldest of the brothers. I
wish we would do more episodes during the season. I've worked on so many bad TV
things. Id go to work and Id just be like, oh Christ. He calls Scott, who is the more
experienced actor of the two (Dean got into the business at an ancient 28), the king of
memorable scenes - and Scott does have a knack for putting on the innocuous, Caucasian
white face. Scott (who is 33) was the silky-haired Harvard jerk in the bar who tried to
woo Minnie Driver in Good Will Hunting (maybe you remember me as the How you
like them apples? guy, he says softly), and he was also the ponytailed jerk in the 80s
part of The People vs. Larry Flynt (maybe you remember me as the guy with his feet
up on the boardroom desk) who took over the editorship at Hustler when the big boss
was at home getting loaded. And now he's a dumb, angel-faced murderer shuffling after
his brother in jail.
I know, I know, Scott wails. Suspend belief here, please. Come on, it's TV,
man. Let's try to force-feed them something with a smidgen of reality. It's better than
force-feeding them soapy, sitcomy cheese. Both Dean and Scott say they get fan letters
from inmates who praise Oz for showing jail as the lose-lose situation that it is. If
?eality is a load of men in wifebeater tees locked up in rooms with Plexiglas doors, the
genderfucker in all of us is pleased as punch. Oz gives us the male version of being
barefoot, black-eyed, and pregnant - the tough guy who is bound, sweaty, and relieved of
all rights. In the previous season, Dean's character even got breast cancer.
Were a bunch of guys that have all come undone, Dean says. There are no
bullshit heroes in Oz. Were there because of our failures.
There are only eight precious episodes made per season, and each one offers
fleeting male frontal nudity, powdered drugs, forced sodomy in the mess hall, and
billyclubs rammed to the kidneys - and that's only in the opening credits! It's enough to
make any viewer want to piss blood and stay glued to the boob tube. Who knew that a
drama that dared to go way beyond and below the usual happy Shawshank vision of jail
would be such a pleasure to watch?
Dean and Scott did some of their research for Oz at one of their earlier jobs, where
they had to fend off hordes of nerved-up, needy people on a constant basis. They were a
bartending duo all over their native Manhattan (The question is: Where didn't we
bartend? says Dean.) and during one particularly uproarious, packed, hot summer night
at Nevada Smiths, Dean and Scott were lobbing around the bullshitty Irish charm, being
very mirthful and blue-eyed, and Tom Fontana, a regular customer, shouldered up to the
bar, noticed that he had a hard, handsome leading man, a gentle sympathetic supporting
role, and a venom-penned dialogue writer within a one-foot radius of a keg, and he decided
to make some stars.
Wrong. It always sounds like the movie Cocktail when we describe how we all
started working on Oz, Brad says wearily. Like were a package deal or something. I
was underage, so of course I was wandering around at the place where my brothers were
bartending. Dean hissed at me, Quick, get that man a Wild Turkey! Maybe that's why
[Fontana] hired me as a writer a couple of years later.
When Fontana asked Dean if he would like a role in Homicide: Life on the Street,
his new TV series, Dean said no. One can imagine Dean crinkling the corners of his eyes
and being very nice about it. I was the first person to turn him down, he remembers
gleefully.
Tom Fontana eventually got over his shock and became the Winters' champion,
patronizing their Work House Theater Company, and commissioning Brathair (Gaelic for
brother), Brad's short film about two brothers in Hells Kitchen. It was the first time we
all got excited about working together, Scott says.
The three of them crowd into the bathroom and get into costume. Presumably.
Laughter ricochets off the tile, and the rest of us exchange nervous glances. One wonders
if one brother is entreating another to jam an explosive device in the toilet.
Eventually the door slams open and they pile out all at once. In their cool suits
and easy matching smiles, they look sweet and untrustworthy.
You're out of your fucking mind, Dean says to Brad, shaking his head in
wonderment. I just wanna know why the fuck were dressed this way. Brad says,
jamming an expensive fedora on the back of his head, yokel-style.
The question lingers: How can the Stanford-educated, English lit and poetry-
majoring Brad Winters, who has never visited a jail, be part of a writing squad that comes
up with such sparkling dialogue for societys dregs? After all, this is a mild-mannered 27-
year-old man who wears cashmere sweaters and says secure, baby-brotherish things like,
I don't consciously remember anything but broad influences on my body of work,
when pressed about his own poetry.
Oz isn't a documentary, he adds cryptically. I use lots of imagination and
research. In an attempt to explain himself, he reminisces about one of his brothers
knocking him out during a demonstration with a homemade pair of nunchaku. You know
how brothers are. That might explain why he knows how some boys can be, if they
aren't brought up as nicely.
Much, much later, coats wrapped tight against the cold, the brothers are walking
across Chinatown looking for a slice of pizza. It would be fun to do the family thing
strictly on our terms, Dean says. He names Death of a Salesman and Hamlet as two of
his dream productions. Not surprisingly, these are stories about blood kin run amok.
With that long, wiry body, Dean Winters can do whatever he wants. He could be a
brathair yelling out of a tenement window, or an architect drawing up plans for a church.
Still, it has been a hard year for Dean. This past summer, he was starring in All Shook
Up, a small, good indie film about the dreary life in New London, CT, but the film died
due to funding problems. Then, at the eleventh hour, he took the romantic lead in
Undercover Angel, playing a down-and-out writer opposite the un-Oz-like Yasmine
Bleeth. Tough breaks, yes, but it's not bad for an actor who doesn't have a publicist or
any sort of entourage that isn't part of the family tree. I'm not sure if Undercover Angel
is going out theatrically. Its the complete, polar opposite of Oz. It's mellow and G-rated.
No ones eating glass or getting raped.
Brad falls into step next to him. That would be PG entertainment.


Valley Brothers Find Home on Oz
Gritty HBO Prison Drama Crucible of Good Acting

The Arizona Republic 7/11/99

What if they made a soap opera and all of the characters were villains?
HBO calls it Oz. A brilliant but brutal prison drama overseen by Tom Fontana
and Barry Levinson, the show begins its third season Wednesday.
Set in an experimental unit (Emerald City) of a fictional slammer (Oswald State
Pen), the series is a crucible of high-intensity acting, razor-sharp writing and imaginative
staging. No surprise there, given the setting and prior career highlights compiled by
executive producers Fontana (Homicide: Life on the Street) and Levinson (Rain Man,
Diner, The Natural).
Two members of the Oz cast have Valley references on their bios. Dean and Scott
Winters, who play doomed brothers Ryan and Cyril O'Reily, both attended Brophy
College Preparatory Academy. Another Winters brother, Brad, is one of the series
writers.
Although New York natives, the acting Winterses each spent critical adolescent
years in the Valley during the 1970s, thanks to Carefree grandparents. (Aren't they all?)
The New York branch of the family visited the Valley often and eventually decided to
relocate. "We felt such a kindred spirit with the desert, and we were all so rocked by the
beauty, we just decided to move out there," Scott said in a recent telephone interview.
"My dad took a lesser-paying job, and we all piled in the station wagon and drove out
West."
The move was difficult for the boys. "Quite frankly, it was a nightmare," Dean
said in a separate interview. "It was a cultural blast coming from cement to the desert. I
had a tough time adjusting." Dean, who's a year older than Scott, spent his freshman year
at Chaparral High School. The next year, both boys attended Brophy, a long haul from
the family's Scottsdale home. "Freshman year was definitely tough," Scott said of his
Brophy years. "I didn't really dig it too much. Sophomore year was kind of the same."
"I really love Arizona, and I did end up loving Brophy, too. There were a lot of
cool teachers, and pretty rigorous academic environment. You were definitely around a lot
of stimulating people." Scott went on to Northwestern University, where he majored in
economics. He briefly worked on Wall Street after graduation. "I wore a suit for a couple
of years," he said.
Dean majored in English at Colorado College, sort of. "Mostly, I majored in trying
to get the hell out of school," he said. "School and I never seemed to walk hand in hand."
After college, Dean kicked around the West Coast, Hong Kong (where he got cast in a
couple of commercials) and Europe before settling again in New York.
Scott caught the show-biz bug first and talked Dean into attending acting class.
Both worked as bartenders before catching their big break." "The brother-bartenders were
kind of like a gimmick around town," Dean said. "We had a pretty big following back in
that day." "Whenever we got hired, we'd pack the house with our friends. Business would
look great, then the bar owners would catch on that we were giving away the bar, and
we'd get fired. This literally happened at seven or eight places."
About that big break: Fontana was one of the brother bartenders' regular
customers. (Something to do with the free drinks, maybe?) Each eventually got acting jobs
as guest stars on Homicide. Dean was first to get cast on Oz. Now, both have joined what
he calls "The Royal Fontana Company"--a group of distinctive actors the writer-producer
frequently employs. J.K. Simmons (who plays Oz's evil White supremacist Vernon
Schillinger) and Zeljko Ivanek (equally evil Gov. James Devlin) both made indelible
impressions on Homicide. "It's like going to a great experimental theater company every
day," said Dean, who's recently been cast in NBC's new-for-fall Law & Order spinoff.
Oz is shot in New York City. That fact of geography, matched with the gritty,
claustrophobic set on which the actors work, contribute to the series grinding
atmosphere. "Going to work is like going to prison," Scott said. (A prison populated by
extremely creative cons, to be sure: Matt Dillon, Chazz Palminteri and Steve Buscemi
each directed episodes of the coming eight-episode season.) Added Dean, "Most of us
walk to work or take a subway to the show. People say, How do you prepare for the
show?' I say, 'I don't. I just walk to work.'" "It can be a wear-and-tear show, but in a good
way. I get home and I'm physically exhausted. But that's why I do this."


People magazine (1999)
Oh, brother section on sexy brothers.

Whether battling bullies in high school or audition angst in Hollywood, actors
Dean Winters, 35, and brother Scott, 34, never go it alone. If you got one of us, you got
both of us, declares Dean. So their ongoing incarceration as the O'Reilly brothers in
HBO's critically lauded prison drama Oz is pretty ideal, says Scott. And while the
native New Yorkers, both of whom are single, also work apart - Dean, who lives in
Manhattan, moonlights at NBC's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; Scott, who lives in
Three Rivers, Calif., is taping a UPN series to be called The Beat - they still watch each
others backs. Says Dean: I wouldn't want to be in this business alone.
Dean: Growing up, I was a year and two weeks older, but Scott was the
levelheaded one. I tend to leap before I look. He tends to be more cerebral and has this
inner stillness that I wish I had. Hes like the Dalai Lama.
Scott: I envy his courage. And people love to be around him because he's a great
personality. I've never had a female friend he hasnt gotten along famously with.
Dean: If I was a woman, Id think Scott was sexy, definitely. He has a way about
him that is kind of soft, a Barry White thing.
Scott: Barry White? Put another log on the fire. Dean was the cool one growing
up.
Dean: We both started dating when we were in junior high. Id date a girl two or
three months.
Scott: I was a long-termer. Id have girlfriends for a couple of years.
Dean: The only time we dated the same woman was when I was 14. I was dating
Jenny Smith, and then we broke up, and Scott took her to the prom.
Scott: Did I? Man...no class!


Interview With Dean And Scott Winters (Daily Radar, June 2000)

Forget about The Sopranos. If you're looking for a gritty crime show that doesn't
pull its punches, then look no further than Oz. For three seasons, the cast of inmates at
the fictional Oswald State Penitentiary has shocked audiences with its depiction of life
inside a maximum-security prison. No subject is taboo on HBO's most hardcore series.
But the stabbings, drug trade, gang wars and seemingly endless parade of rapes are just
the window dressing on this award-winning show. Beneath the intense storylines is a
group of television's bravest actors.
Included among the prison population are Ryan and Cyril O'Reily, a quick-talking
heroin-pushing Irishman and his mentally retarded brother. Played by real-life brothers
Dean and Scott Winters, these characters are two of the most popular cons ever to share a
cell. Daily Radar caught up with the Winters just before they began shooting the second
half of Oz Season Four:
DR: So I assume you made it through Season Four alive?
Dean: (laughs) Yeah, barely.
DR: How far in advance do you know what's going to happen to your characters on the
show?
Dean: Basically we get seven days. We get the script for the following episode the day
that we start. So if we're shooting Episode 6, on the first day, we get the script for
Episode 7. It's enough time to absorb it, but it's not like a month in advance. [Series
creator] Tom Fontana usually has a conversation with each actor kinda telling him what's
going to be happening to him.
DR: Over the course of a season or an episode?
Dean: A season. He'll take the main characters like myself, Scott, J.K., Harold, and he'll
say "Okay, you're gonna get breast cancer, and you're gonna fall in love with the doctor."
They give you a through line. There are a lot of guys who open up these scripts and have
no idea that they're dying. It's a little tough to be around. It's a little depressing.
DR: What's the toughest scene you've had to do?
Dean: Besides being raped, which we haven't gone through, I don't think there is anything
we haven't done that anyone else has done. I had to be the first one fully naked on the
show. I was thrown into the hole in the first season. Full frontal nudity. It was a mess. I
was coming off a heroin addiction on the show, and I was naked in that room. This was
back in the first season before the room was padded. I ended up ripping my back up. We
definitely had to do our share of tough scenes. Scott was boxing in scenes, and that was
physically wrenching for the guys who had to box last year.
Scott: It seems that Tom gives me some real heavyweight emotional scenes. For the last
three seasons he's been giving me scenes that are emotionally really challenging, and I so
welcome them as an actor. It's such a privilege to be able to go that far emotionally.
DR: Is it tough to do some of the heavier scenes when you're playing a character that's
slow? Does that limit your range?
Scott: Something new is inevitably going to come out. I think what I need to do
emotionally is understood before the scene. And certainly I'm pretty familiar with the
character Cyril at this point, so when I combine those two -- Cyril with the proper
emotional reaction -- something new generally comes out that is really scary and even new
to me. But it ends up reading truthfully. I don't know if you saw any of the first half of
the upcoming season, but there is some more of the same as far as the heavy emotional
scenes, but they're very different. You'll see different sides to Cyril. I'm really glad I'm
getting to do so much powerful emotional work -- on TV, no less.
DR: You mentioned boxing; you guys have some background in boxing.
Dean: Scott does.
Scott: I was boxing when I was 15 and training for Golden Gloves. This was in Arizona,
when I was living out there. I got a kidney injury in football, and I had to stop boxing, but
I had definitely gotten to a place where I had established some good talent and a real
comprehension of the sport.
DR: How long did it take to shoot some of those fight scenes?
Scott: The boxing scenes? The first guy, I knocked out the Aryan. That took about four
or five hours. On film it ended up being a 2-3 minute fight. It was fun. We were slugging it
out once in awhile. In acting, they don't usually like to push the real boxing.
DR: Who's the toughest guy on the set?
Dean and Scott: (simultaneously) Chuck Zito.
DR: He's the real deal, eh?
Dean: Oh yeah. And there are a number of extras that you wouldn't want to f*ck with,
either. Guys who wouldn't wanna be mentioned in the press because they have some
serious pasts.
Scott: Some gang guys and such.
DR: Are they on set as "technical advisors"?
Dean: The first year there was a guy who had done a 10-year bit upstate, and he was on
the set as a "technical advisor," but he became kind of a pain in the ass, so they got rid of
him.
DR: What kinds of things made him a pain in the ass?
Dean: He just talked too much. A lot of the extras, especially in the bigger scenes in the
cafeteria or last year in the boxing scenes, a lot of those guys have done time. They really
brought a real flavor to the show. And one of the guys on the show who plays a guard,
his brother is a guard. But you don't want to get too many technical guys down there,
because then it gets confusing, and you lose the creativity.
DR: Have you heard any prison stories that made it into the show?
Dean: Did you see in the first season where I ground the glass up [and put it into another
inmate's food]? That is a real story that the sound guy told Tom Fontana. It's a true story
from up in Sing Sing. Last year I also did a scene where I took off one of my tattoos with
a piece of sandpaper. One of the extras on the show told us that he took off another guy's
tattoo in prison with an iron.
Scott: I've heard about a couple of scalpings. One guy was in Oklahoma, and he was
getting transferred to another prison, and he was approached by the baddest guy in the
prison -- this is a guy I won't name -- and he ended up scalping the guy. The guy had long
hair and he just ripped the hair out of his head and the scalp came off with it.
DR: Did you guys go to any prisons to do research before taking the roles?
Dean: Any actor who tells you that he went into gen pop for research is full of sh*t,
because you would immediately become a trophy for somebody. I'm sure you could do it
at one of those country club prisons, but nobody is going into gen pop at Attica and be
walking around. And personally, I don't know how Robert Downey Jr. is surviving at
Corcorcan.
Scott: He's at Corcorcan?
Dean: Yeah, and he's in gen pop. He's walking around at Corcorcan, which is one of the
most dangerous prisons in the United States. That's where Manson is. It's a crazy place. I
don't know how he's doing it. It's pretty hard to do physical research, but Scott and I are
addicted to those A&E and HBO prison documentaries. But I don't think anyone on the
show, except those guys who have done time, have a clue what it's like to be inside.
DR: Would you last a day in prison?
Dean: I wouldn't last five minutes.
DR: Are either of you two ever on the Internet?
Scott: Every now and then.
DR: I was looking around the Internet and there are a number of Dean Winters fan
pages. On one of them, Dedicated to Dean Winters, you can go on and vote for your
favorite Dean Winters haircut.
Dean: (laughs hard) You're kidding me.
DR: And there is one called Lord of the Dance that is a collection of X-Rated Ryan O'Reily
fan fiction.
Dean: (still laughing) Wow. I don't have a computer, but I gotta go find that.
DR: Is there any sibling rivalry? I noticed there are no Scott Winters fan sites.
Dean: There will be this year.
Scott: There is a web site where I get to read a lot of fan mail. HBO has a Cyril section,
and I got to read a lot of fan mail last year. It was cool, because I didn't realize how
seriously people took our acting. You know, HBO being a show with prison content, it's
not going to be out front like the popular network shows, so it's nice to hear what
America thinks.
DR: Do you think that the fact that the show takes place in prison has prevented Oz from
getting acclaim of something more mainstream like The Sopranos?
Dean: Definitely.
Scott: Without question. People have loved gangsters for 50 years now.
Dean: The Sopranos is a great show, and those guys are all friends of ours, but that's a
very tried and true formula. There is nothing risk-taking about that show. And that's not
to bash them, because they do a really good job. The writing is great. The acting is superb.
But there isn't a show on television that takes even half the chances that we take. But we
get critical acclaim. The only bad reviews I can remember have come from USA Today and
TV Guide. But all the people that seem to matter, like The New York Times and the LA
Times, they've all responded really well.
Scott: As far as TV goes, I can't imagine doing a better show than Oz. It's fantastic.
DR: How does the set differ from network shows you've worked on? (Dean was a regular
on Law and Order and Scott has appeared on Angel.)
Dean: I think the big difference is that we have no interference from HBO. Because we're
on cable, we do pretty much anything we want. And also, the sheer physicality of the
set. As soon as you walk through the doors, you really feel like you're in prison.
Scott: There's also no private wars, and no egos on the set. You get a lot of that with the
network shows just because there's a lot more dough involved, and they're a lot more
mainstream productions. Fortunately enough, as great as the actors all are and as much
testosterone as there is in the show, there's really no egos. Everyone really digs hanging
out with each other. That's very different than with most mainstream shows, where there
is much more at stake.
DR: How'd you like working with the guest directors that came in for Season Two and
Three?
Scott: That was really fun because Dean and I actually grew up with the Dillon family.
We were friends with Matt and Kevin before. So it was really fun to work with Matt.
And to find out that Kathy Bates was a big Oz fan was a bonus.
Dean: And all those directors, like Matt, Chazz [Palminteri], Kathy and [Steve]
Buscemi... they're all hardcore New Yorkers. So even though Matt and Chazz had never
directed before, and Kathy had done only one episode of Homicide, they all brought a real
New York flavor. Even though the show takes place in a non-disclosed place, I think it's
pretty obvious where it is. It was great for a lot of the actors who hadn't worked much
before to have these movie stars walking around the set. Anyone who says they're not
impressed by that is full of sh*t.
Scott: What was really cool about Steve Buscemi was that our brother Brad wrote his
episode. Brad is a writer for Levinson-Fontana, and he was up for a Writer's Guild award
for that episode.
Dean: Buscemi is coming back to direct another episode, and it looked like Willem Dafoe
was going to be in there for a minute, but now he's not. And Cher was going to direct one.
I was actually really looking forward to that, because she directed that HBO thing last
year, and she really crushed it. But her schedule didn't work out.
DR: I understand that the almighty Gavin "Love Boat" MacLeod did a guest stint in this
coming season.
Dean: Yeah, Gavin came in as The Cardinal. And at first we were all like "What the
f*ck?" But he was really good. He's got that fatherly thing going on. He was great. There
aren't many guest stars on the show this season except for musicians. The lead singer of
the Brand Nubians and Pepa from Salt 'n Pepa are on.
DR: How long will you stay on the show?
Dean: Personally, I won't leave Oz for anything. Personally, I think everything else on
TV sucks. And the movies that are coming out these days really aren't that impressive.
We love working with Tom. We love working in the city. We don't know how long the
show is going to last, but I've been there since Day One.
DR: Have either of you been typecast from this show?
Scott: I don't think casting directors know what to do with me. I'm very leading man. If I
cut my hair, I'd be doing Harrison Ford parts. As long as my hair is long, I'm getting all
these great character roles where most of the guys are jerks.
DR: Do people still come up to you and say "How 'bout them apples?" after Good Will
Hunting?
Scott: I get that a lot. "How 'bout them apples? How 'bout them apples?" Actually, I
think Damon stole that line from Jackie Gleason and The Honeymooners.
DR: Dean, are you still doing Law and Order?
Dean: No, I left that show. I had a contract to do 13 episodes with them. It was a great
show for me to do, but I'm more comfortable in a prison than a precinct.
Season Four of Oz begins Wednesday, July 12 at 10:00 p.m. on HBO.


Tension rules Em City
By Joanne Ostrow
Denver Post TV/Radio Critic

June 28, 2000 - Em City's in lockdown. Adebisi has a gun. Cyril's having nightmares,
racial tensions are high, and newcomer Desmond Mobay is shown to his cell. A loner
with a Jamaican accent, he's actually an undercover narcotics investigator.
It's testosterone-overload as usual on "Oz," the frighteningly tough and superbly
written, directed and acted HBO drama about the fictional Oswald State Correctional
Facility, nicknamed Emerald City. The series begins its fourth season on July 12,
following "The Sopranos." Eight new episodes will air this summer, all written by
executive producer Tom Fontana; an additional eight begin early next year.
As usual, just when you think the tension is impossibly high, the producers crank
it up a notch. Fontana, Barry Levinson and Jim Finnerty continue to oversee the series
that is unabashedly violent, sometimes theatrical in style yet brutally honest in the truths
it tells.
Those truths concern the animalistic behavior of humans locked away in a
maximum-security prison; the warring political factions inside; the flaws and futility of
the system; the fine line between the authorities and the inmates. Take your pick: Oz is
hell on Earth or Oz is a microcosm of America.
Lance Reddick ( "I Dreamed of Africa," "Falcone''), a new cast regular who plays
the undercover cop, and Scott Winters, who plays inmate Cyril O'Reily, were in Denver
this week to promote the series.
His first thought before reading the scripts, Reddick said, was "I know I'm gonna
die (on the series), just so long as I don't get raped."
That's a very real concern on "Oz," of course, where the sexual violence of prison
is depicted awfully graphically. We know this much: Reddick's character lives through at
least the next eight episodes but eventually he will be found out. ( "Donnie Brasco"
author and undercover cop Joe Pistone gave Reddick pointers when they met on
"Falcone." Pistone told him always assume a cover personality that's close to your real
personality, in case you slip. "My character makes mistakes," Reddick said. The accent
for starters, is "just dumb.'')
Winters, whose character Cyril has a gentle soul, a relatively pure heart and a slow
mind, is gentle, pure and quite intellectual in person. Beyond "Oz," he wrote and directed
an as yet unsold film and wrote and starred in a one-man show, "Dog." "I usually play the
jerk," he said, citing his roles in "Good Will Hunting" and "The People vs. Larry Flynt."
"Hollywood equates long hair with jerk." "Oz" is not Hollywood. It's shot in New
York, at least until the lease on the huge Chelsea warehouse expires. "Oz" may be the first
TV series canceled due to a real estate dispute, Winters noted. The production wraps at
the end of August, its future uncertain.
In the industry, Winters says, "Oz" is considered an actor's show. "Jack
Nicholson doesn't miss an episode," he said. "Neither does Wayne Newton."
Maybe he shouldn't publicize the latter.


Escape to Oz
The dark brilliance of HBO's prison drama 'Oz' makes it TV's most intense hour.
By Marc Allan
Indianapolis Star
July 2, 2000
NEW YORK -- Take the slow, rickety elevator to the sixth floor of the nondescript office
building at 15th Street and Ninth Avenue, and you'll be in the only prison where you
actually might want to spend time.
This is Oswald State Correctional Facility -- Oz -- home to some of the most
violent offenders ever to appear on your TV screen.
Simon Adebisi infected another prisoner with AIDS-tainted blood and spiked an
inmate's food with ground glass, causing the internal bleeding that slowly killed him. Ryan
O'Reily instructed his brain-damaged brother to kill the prison doctor's husband after she
rejected his advances. Kareem Said, head of the black Muslims, instigated a riot that left
several people dead. And so on.
For three seasons (the fourth begins July 12), HBO has put this brutality on
display in Oz, easily the best, most intense drama on television. Oz is ugly, frightening,
an unflinching demonstration of the evil men do.
And on a glorious day back in mid-March, I visited the Oz set, where the cast was
shooting a scene that neatly summarizes the series' dark brilliance. A new inmate has been
buying large amounts of drugs. The prisoners suspect he may be an undercover cop, so
they put him to the test by forcing him to snort heroin -- something an undercover cop
wouldn't be allowed to do. They lay out four lines on the floor of the weight room. After
each line goes up his nose, he looks up to hear an ominous command from the prisoners
who surround him: "More." It's like a Greek chorus of doom. The scene is shot over and
over -- for more than an hour, from perhaps a dozen angles -- to capture the terror of the
suspected officer and the satisfied glee of his antagonists. When it's wrapped up, there are
smiles and laughter all around.
If anything is jarring about being on this set, it's not the size of the glass-and-
chrome "Emerald City" area, which looks more spacious on TV. No, it's the abrupt way
the atmosphere changes. Prisoners who inflict the worst physical and psychological
damage on each other one minute revert to what they are -- actors who like each other and
appreciate the chance to work with great material.
"It's a dream role," says Dean Winters, who plays the conniving O'Reily, standing
on the roof of the building for a cigarette break, speaking with the same nervous energy as
his character. "Every day I come to work, I get to be so nasty and I get to really exorcise
my dark demons. "I was talking to someone the other day and they said, 'Do you find
yourself starting to act like Ryan O'Reily in real life?' First of all, if I did that, I'd be in a
lot of trouble. But I said no, it's just the opposite. I get to come here and be (a jerk) and
get my ya-ya's out. Then, when I leave the set, I'm like the nicest person in the world."
That doesn't stop people from being scared. Winters tells the story of being recognized on
a subway early this year. He says the woman who saw him started whimpering. His
response: "I was like, 'Relax, it's just a TV show, lady.' "
But Oz has that effect. The show isn't real, but it feels that way. Every cast
member has a story about viewers who've forgotten they're watching scripted drama.
Lee Tergesen plays Tobias Beecher, an alcoholic lawyer sentenced to Oz after he
killed a little girl in a drunken-driving accident. Beecher is Everyman in prison -- small,
scared and vulnerable. Over three seasons, he has been raped, branded with a swastika
tattoo and had his arms and legs broken. He also has learned to survive. Tergesen was in a
New York pizza place when a man walked up and said he hated Beecher. "What he
hated," Tergesen says, "was the things I did. When Beecher would be abused, the crew
guys were always, 'Why don't you just kick his ass?' And I was like, 'It's a scene.' "
Identifying with characters
He surmises that people who watch Oz put themselves in the characters' places
and wonder whether they could survive. "The rules that apply on the outside don't apply
in here," says Eamonn Walker, the British actor who plays the powerful, focused and
distinctly American Minister Said (pronounced SI-eed). "The strongest survive, or the
smartest. Those are the rules. So when you call somebody evil because they did
something or they do something or they manipulate to get their way, they don't really
have any other options."
Consider the scene where the inmates force heroin on the suspected undercover
cop. Walker has been watching on a monitor in the prison cafeteria (which is directly
outside the prison gym/basketball court) as the prisoners impose their will. "In jail, there
are all sorts of tests that you can put somebody through to see where they stand," he
says. "That's a test. It's not evil. They don't have any other way of knowing. If they're
wrong, he's got a bit of a problem, and they'll get him off it. If they make a big mistake,
they've got so much too lose."
Trying to survive
Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje agrees. He plays Adebisi, perhaps the toughest
prisoner in Oz and one of the ones commanding "more." "I see him as a guy who's just
doing his daily business, trying to survive before they knock him off," says Akinnouye-
Agbaje, who knows something about people like the one he plays. He grew up in London
and Lagos, Nigeria, which he describes as "more vibrant, more energetic, more ruthless
than any city I've ever come across." A trained lawyer, model, actor and musician, he
came to the United States seven years ago with the intention of making music inspired by
his heroes, the great African musician Fela Kuti and the father of reggae, Bob Marley.
Instead, he ended up in a Mary J. Blige music video and movies including Ace Ventura:
When Nature Calls. Sitting in his dressing room, Adewale -- pronounced Ad-eh-wah-lay -
- picks up a trumpet and blows a short, soulful solo. This is not what anyone would
expect from Adebisi, who'd be more likely to use the instrument to crush someone's skull.
Casting against type is something that appeals to Oz creator/executive producer
Tom Fontana, which is why he hired venerable actress Rita Moreno -- the first person to
win an Oscar, Tony, Emmy and Grammy -- to play Sister Peter Marie. She calls it
"Tom's perverse notion of casting." As "Sister Pete," Moreno plays a small but meaty
role trying to counsel the prisoners. Having made her fame as Anita in West Side Story,
she's acquainted with theatrical violence. But Oz goes places the Sharks and Jets would
have never talked about. Sometimes, that makes Moreno cringe. "I think some of it's
excessive, I really do," she says. "Very likely, Tom may think so, too. But that's what he
wants. I don't know what demons he's trying to exorcise, but I can't help feeling there's
something that's very personal about the way he writes." That said, she finds his writing
"innovative and bold in the best sense." Moreno tells what she calls a "delicious" story
about Fontana calling her with an idea about how to stage the prison riot that ended Oz's
first season. She said Fontana wanted to put on West Side Story with Beecher in drag as
Anita. The simulated violence in the play would turn real, and the riot would be on.
Unfortunately, Moreno says with a laugh, the rights to the play were unavailable. But
that bit of mischief gives some insight into how Fontana thinks.
Ernie Hudson, who plays warden Leo Glynn, says: "I don't know how people get
through the stuff that goes on in Tom Fontana's head. And I hope to never find out.
Hudsons career has included roles in everything from Roots: The Next Generation to
Ghostbusters, and he smiles when he talks about the demons Fontana lets out through
Oz. He also marvels at Fontana's ability to take the audience to prison, a place they don't
necessarily want to go, and explore subjects they'd rather not face. "When I was a kid,"
Hudson says, "we thought the military was a place to grow up. With my sons, college
was the place to grow up. It's that space between being a kid at home and being an adult
on your own. . . . But unfortunately for a lot of young African-Americans, prison
becomes that initiation period. I hate to think what that implies."
While Oz deals with a heightened version of daily prison life, its subplots have
gone to other corners of society -- male breast cancer, old people in prison, notorious
inmates selling their belongings through computer auction services. And, this being a show
about prison, Oz has delved into homosexual relationships. Among the more intriguing
and talked-about story lines is the ongoing relationship between Beecher and Chris Keller
(played by Chris Meloni). "When it started, we were really nervous about it," says
Tergesen, who takes on the subject with characteristic good humor. "Obviously, just
because it was something we hadn't really dealt with, especially at work. Because, let's
face it, it wasn't like I hadn't kissed men before. But it was weird when we first got that
script because we talked about it and we really wanted to go towards it rather than shy
away from it. And I think it paid off."
In "Wayne's World"
Before Oz, Tergesen's best-known role may have been as Terry, one of Wayne
and Garth's headbanging friends in the Wayne's World movies. "I was the guy who said, 'I
love you, Wayne. I love you, Garth.' Now when I say 'I love you' to men, it's a little
different," he jokes. "But basically, the love theme is there in all my work." Tergesen also
has a serious psychological take on what has happened to Beecher. "The greatest thing
humans can do is assimilate," he says. "The abused child can see the abuse as love. So it's
the same sort of thing -- you start to interpret things in a way that keeps you from losing
your mind."
Exactly right, says Winters, whose Ryan O'Reily keeps his sanity (and the breath
in his body) by playing his fellow prisoners against one another. Winters grew up in New
York City, which gives him a leg up on survival instincts. Seven years ago, he and his
brother Scott (who plays his brother Cyril on Oz) met Fontana when they were
bartending. Both made appearances on Fontana's acclaimed NBC show, Homicide: Life on
the Street, before getting their roles on Oz. In the spring, Winters thought Oz would
finish its 11 weeks of taping and he'd be out looking for work. But HBO ordered eight
more episodes, which gave the cast and crew double the work. The second batch of
episodes will begin airing in January, leading up to the next season of HBO's The
Sopranos. The stories of Tony Soprano and the New Jersey mob have garnered their
share of acclaim -- and then some. Oz hasn't gotten nearly that amount of recognition, and
cast members speculate it's because of the grimness.
"People know it's quality TV," Walker says. "They just wish it wasn't so real.
When you explain that it has to be that harsh, it has to be that real, the violence has to be
that bad because we're used to westerns where people go bang, bang, bang and John
Wayne gets up again two seconds later and you watch him in the second matinee. "We've
become conditioned to think that it's all right to watch all that violence and, therefore, we
can watch it over and over again. The whole point of Oz is, yeah, it's harsh. Don't go
outside and play with this stuff. You bleed. You die."
Copyright 2000 Indiana Newspapers Inc.


Time Out New York weekly magazine (July 2000)

Prison Break - Late bloomer Dean Winters is one to watch on HBO's no-holds-barred
series
By Greg Emmanuel

A lot of actors try to pass themselves off as being down-to-earth and
unpretentious. But when you hear Dean Winters say it, you actually believe him. On a
recent Thursday, walking home from a long day on the Chelsea set of his HBO show
"OZ" (which returns with all new episodes starting Wednesday, July 12th), Winters is
jonesing for a cigarette and a beer. He passes up this trendy Meatpacking District eatery
Pastis and suggests "grabbing a six-pack and settling on a stoop," but en route to a bodega,
the sight of a small bar with a couple of benches outside looks all too inviting.
His need to relax is understandable. There are brutal television shows, and then
there is "OZ". The unrelentingly intense story of a maximum-security prison pushes the
depiction of violence on TV to new levels ("OZ" makes "The Sopranos" look positively
Disney) while consistently delivering story lines that have the soap opera-like power of
addictive drama.
Winters has been a key member of the ensemble show since it first aired in 1997,
playing Ryan O'Reilly, the hotheaded leader of an Irish gang. Feeding glass to another
prisoner? Been there. Ordering your brother to kill your girlfriend's husband? Done that.
Poisoning another inmate? Check. Who wouldn't want a drink after leaving even a
fictitious Oswald State Correctional Facility?
Winters, 35, drags on an American Spirit cigarette and exhales deeply. "I don't
want to say I was taking my work home with me," he says, reflecting on his first season
on the show. "It's not like I was going home and feeding my girlfriend glass or knocking
her around or anything, but I was probably not the most enjoyable person to be around."
After completing production on five seasons, however - the fourth season begins this
week, and a fifth season follows in January - Winters has learned the trick to managing the
emotions the show demands of him. Just relaxing, like he's doing right now, seems to be
an integral part of the process.
While acting is still relatively new to him (he got his first professional job only 4
years ago), blowing off steam is not. Winters will be the first to tell you that in his
twenties, he "ran around a lot and got into a lot of trouble." Following a largely misspent
youth - he grew up on Long Island and in Arizona, and went to college in Colorado -
Winters chased a girl around Europe, while doing a little modeling to make ends meet. At
27, he moved back to New York, slept on friends' couches and moved from bartending gig
to bartending gig. He worked in no less than 17 watering holes around the city and was
fired from all of them, "mostly for giving away more drinks than I sold," he says. During
that time, Winter's younger brother, Scott (who plays also incarcerated brother on the
show), convinced Dean to "fucking do something with your life." Scott, who was
studying acting at the time, got his older brother an acting coach and an apartment.
It was a chance meeting with "OZ" creator-producer Tom Fontana that lead first
to a friendship, and eventually to a fruitful collaboration. "Dean and his brother had
bartended a lot," Fontana says with a laugh "and being a guy who drinks a lot, they
seemed like two good guys to know."
Eventually he asked Dean - who had no on-screen experience - to be on his show
"Homicide" and the actor turned the writer-producer down. "Tom says I'm the only
person who's ever said no to him," Winters recounts. "I told him I didn't feel like I was
ready. A year and a half later, I ended up doing "Homicide" and I really sucked. [The
reruns] are on Court TV all the time, and it's so embarrassing."
After Winters appeared on a few other TV shows ("NYPD Blue", "Millennium"),
Fontana picked him to be on his groundbreaking prison drama. (He has since appeared on
"Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" as the naive detective Brian Cassidy.) The producer
holds a more optimistic viewpoint than Winters of his actor's developing chops: "Dean
has the capacity to fill in the blanks of a character with his own understanding of the
world," Fontana says. "I think he thinks of himself as a journeyman actor, but I, of
course, think of him as a leading man."
Getting Winters to talk about the "acting process" actually causes him to wince. "
I have no room for pretentious, arrogant actors," he says. "I would never say that acting is
easy, or it's something that you just 'wake up and do,' I come from a school where, if
you're getting paid to act, keep your fucking mouth shut, because no one wants to hear
your philosophies."
Although the brutality of "OZ" can be grating on an actor, Winters looks forward
each day to slipping on his character's omnipresent wife-beater T-shirt and gold cross,
and walking onto the meticulously recreated prison set to become Ryan O'Reilly. "'Oz' is
a dream job," he says, finishing off a second Stella Artois. "It's one of the best TV shows
ever - and I'm not just saying that because I'm on it." As usual, you actually believe him.


Peach Buzz: 'Oz' inmates escape to Atlanta
Richard L. Eldredge - Staff
Monday, July 10, 2000

Naturally, the security guard outside Plush was the first guy to recognize actors Harold
Perrineau and Dean Winters when they arrived at the Buckhead nightclub over the
weekend. The two play inmates on the HBO prison drama series "Oz," which enters its
sixth season on the cable network Wednesday night at 11.
"People always ask where my wheelchair is," Perrineau told us over breakfast at
the J.W. Marriott hotel. Perrineau plays Augustus Hill, the show's wheelchair-bound
narrator. "They don't really get that it's just for the role."
Winters has had his own unusual interactions with fans off the set. "For some
reason, cops always want to pose for pictures and ask for autographs. One time a cop in
New York saw me out walking and picked me up and gave me a ride downtown to where
I was going."
Both actors agree that one big perk of doing "Oz" is working with longtime actress
Rita Moreno, who portrays Sister Peter Marie Reimondo, the prison's staff psychologist.
"She's one of the guys," said Winters. "She's got a mouth like a truck driver. I've had the
world's biggest crush on her since I saw 'West Side Story' on TV when I was a kid."
While "Oz" is busy reforming jaywalkers nationwide these days, Winters and
Perrineau admit that a similar show, the prison documentary "Scared Straight," had the
same effect on them as young people in the 1970s. Said Winters: "When that inmate
screamed at the visiting kids to give him their shoes, it was enough to have me taking mine
off in my living room. I was like, 'Mom, I need some stamps!' At that moment, I decided
against a criminal career."

HBO hits sexy Nerve
by Anna Cahnda
CYBERSPACE - Broadcaster HBO and e-zine Nerve.com have teamed on a project that is expected to bring risque, sexually themed reality programming to primetime cable television.Production of a 30-minute pilot for the series, tentatively entitled "Nerve", began in April. Neither HBO nor Nerve.com would comment about when the pilot would air.HBO is billing the planned series as a mix of fantasy and reality about human sexuality, centered around day-to-day activities at the offices of the four-year-old Web-bound and print magazine. "Nerve" the series will employ live action and animation as it explores behind-the-scenes hijinks, according to Nerve.com spokeswoman Isabella Robertson.Ross Martin, vice president of television development for Nerve.com, described the show as "mostly reality and unscripted." He noted that "Nerve" represents the first time HBO has attempted sexual programming to be aired during primetime.One of the key elements of the series' pilot episode was filmed June 7 during Nerve's fourth anniversary party at the company's New York offices. Guests included recording artist Moby, former Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan, and Dean Winters, one of the stars of HBO's hit prison drama Oz. Robertson described the party's atmosphere as "racy," but the raunch factor was low. Decor for the event included posters of "Nerve Nudes" adorning the walls and a 12-foot digital screen broadcasting the antics of those brave enough to enter the hot-pink exhibitionist booth near the center of the floor. Robertson said entertainment included nearly naked bodybuilders and contortionists, while libations consisted of "Swedish sex cocktails." Executive producers for "Nerve" the series are Nerve.com chief executive and co-founder Rufus Griscom, editorial director and co-founder Genevieve Field, and Martin. On the HBO side, Executive Vice President of Original Programming Sheila Nevins is acting as executive producer, and John Hoffman - winner of Emmy, Peabody and Ace awards - is producing.

Oz article from July 15 NY Times Arts Section.
Warning - Spoilers!

July 15, 2001
The Inmates of 'Oz' Move Into a New Emerald City
By LAUREN DAVID PEDEN BAYONNE, N.J.-- TOM FONTANA, creator of the HBO prison drama "Oz," had no choice but to end the series' fourth season in February with a bang, blowing up the fictitious Oswald Correctional Facility. The show was being booted from the 60,000-square-foot space in Chelsea Market where its annual eight episodes had always been filmed, and viewers would need to know why the set looked different when they tune in next year. The landlord at Chelsea Market on Ninth Avenue, Mr. Fontana said, had not given the show's producers the option of renegotiating their lease. "It was a lot of space, and he rented it to New York 1 ??p;quot; the cable news station "??r 10 years because we could only do a yearly lease," he said. "He didn't even tell me. I found out by reading about it in The Villager." With HBO committed to a fifth season for the series, the "Oz" team scrambled to find a suitably large space in a location convenient for the mostly New York-based cast and crew. They found it across the harbor at the Military Ocean Terminal in Bayonne, a 437- acre Army base that closed in 1998. Its massive industrial buildings and tons of undeveloped land were just the thing for "Oz," which ??th upward of 30 recurring characters, countless guest spots and hundreds of tough-guy extras ??s one of the largest casts in the history of series television. "Our locations guy called and said, `Come over and look at this place,' and I was like: `Bayonne? There's a tunnel involved; I can't go somewhere there's a tunnel,' " Mr. Fontana said. "But he sent me a plan and some photographs, and one of the photographs was of a place in Bayonne called Fontana's Pizza. I was like, well, it can't be that bad." In April, after several months of round- the-clock> construction, Building 73, a 120,000-square-foot warehouse-turned-maximum security prison, was ready to be occupied by the men and women of "Oz" (Mr. Fontana signed a three-year lease at $570,360 a year). And on May 23, Mayor Joseph V. Doria Jr. announced that Bayonne planned to develop a large portion of the terminal into a film and television production facility ??kind of Hollywood on the Hudson. Ron Howard has already shot the feature "A Beautiful Mind," starring Russell Crowe, on a neighboring sound stage. "This place was a godsend," Mr. Fontana said. "It's not like there was that much space sitting undeveloped two blocks from the Chelsea Market." The new-and-improved location boasts enlarged and revamped gymnasium and cafeteria sets, a bigger Emerald City ??e experimental prison- within-a-prison where much of the show's action takes place ??th 15 more glass-walled pods, and linked sets that allow for longer establishing shots and more complex camera angles. But getting there was something of an adventure for the cast and crew during the filming of the new season's episodes, which ended late last month. Dean Winters, who plays the scheming inmate Ryan O'Reily, used to jump on his bike and ride to the old set from his home in SoHo. Lee Tergesen (the fallen lawyer Tobias Beecher) was able to walk the 14 blocks from his apartment. This year, Mr. Tergesen commuted by motorcycle, and Mr. Winters, along with most of the other cast members, caught a ride in the "Oz" van, which shuttled between Manhattan and Bayonne several times a day. (Residents of the West Village might have noticed a group of familiar-looking felons loitering on a corner at 6 in the morning, five days a week.) There was one unexpected benefit of spending 12 hours a day (from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.) stuck out in what seemed like the middle of nowhere: the already tight cast became even closer. Lauren Velez (Dr. Gloria Nathan) used to go shopping or run errands on her lunch hour; J. K. Simmons (the neo-Nazi inmate Vern Schillinger, and the voice of the yellow M&M in commercials) would run to voiceover auditions; Eamonn Walker (the Muslim leader Kareem Said) would head downstairs for ice cream. This time the series regulars hung out on the lot or in their trailers, talking, eating and playing video games."I've been here five years with these guys and still didn't really know them," said Mums, who plays the inmate Poet."Everybody would go their own way. Now we go outside and throw a football or softball around, and we're bonding more."The camaraderie on "Oz" was readily apparent to a visitor. The prison factions ??slims, Aryans, Latinos, black gang members ??y mix it up on-screen with bloody consequences, but off-screen there was a jovial, laid-back vibe rare in the ego-driven entertainment industry. Between takes, Robert Clohessy (Officer Murphy) got a friendly back rub from a transvestite, while the pigtailed, pink-sweatered daughter of Michael Wright (Omar White) scampered among the enormous, tattooed extras. Dean Winters's mother, Penelope, watched from the sidelines. (Her son Scott, Dean's brother, plays O'Reily's brother Cyril.) It felt like "take your family to `Oz' day," but cast members said it was par for the course. "We're so horrible to each other on the screen that we have to be really nice to each other off," Mr. Walker said. Cast and crew credited Mr. Fontana for the familial atmosphere, and for keeping the show fresh after five years."Tom has a million story lines in him," said Terry Kinney, who plays the prison administrator Tim McManus. "He keeps bringing in stuff that we're all surprised by, so it's not become repetitive in any way, and that has been a blessing for all of us." Rita Moreno, who plays Sister Peter Marie, said: "Most writers don't want to hear from you, it's just, `Do your lines, collect your check and get out of here.' Tom is very accessible and he's always interested. If you have an idea and Tom likes it and can utilize it, he will. We have a wonderful kind of intimacy that is very rare between an actor and a writer." The collaborative and mutually trusting atmosphere has made it easier for "Oz," which is HBO's longest-running dramatic series, to tackle highly charged issues like the death penalty and society's attitude toward criminals, to explore taboos like the sexual fantasies of a nun (an idea conceived by Ms. Moreno) and to offer realistically complex portrayals of same-sex relationships. "Oz" was dealing frankly with promiscuity and homosexuality before shows like "Sex and the City" or "Queer as Folk" existed, and its graphic depictions of the consequences of crime and violence pre- date "The Sopranos." "We've done things that nobody else is doing," Mr. Tergesen said. His character, an upper-crust lawyer convicted of vehicular manslaughter, has fallen in love with a man for the first time; had a swastika tattooed on his rear by a savage cellmate; dealt with his son's murder and his wife's suicide; and bitten off the tip of a fellow prisoner's penis when forced to perform oral sex. The violence of "Oz" can be hard to stomach, and its characters difficult or impossible to like. But "the show causes people to look at themselves," Mr. Tergesen said. "Whereas `The Sopranos' and `Queer as Folk' are more like, `That's not what I'm about.' You can look at it and feel separated from it. You know, `Oh, those gay guys!' or `Look at those gangsters ??en't they quirky?' > "There are lessons and there are morals to the stories" in "Oz," he said. "It's like, look at what we do to each other. I mean, it's really about the world; it just happens to take place in a prison."The fifth season, which is to begin in January, will find Mr. Fontana in a more tender mood. He has introduced story arcs about prisoners training seeing-eye dogs and continuing inmate "interactions" led by Sister Peter. "There are genuine moments of redemption, several of them involving major characters," he said. He is also trying to inject more estrogen into the show's testosterone-fueled atmosphere, with subplots involving the prisoners' female relatives and a new jailhouse music program overseen by Betty Buckley, playing O'Reily's biological mother. "This female element is going to be echoed throughout the whole season," Mr. Fontana said. "For me, it's just a matter of going, O.K., let's take this testosterone vat and let's see what a wife or a mother or just a friendly face would do to change the equation."That doesn't mean that the show is done taking on tough topics, or that buckets of blood will not be shed in the name of realism. "I open up The New York Times any given day of the week, and there is another article about the prison system that's just fascinating, and I go, `That's a great story!' " Mr. Fontana said."There are so many real stories out there that are fodder for a series, and I'm the only guy in the game. "When we were doing `Homicide,' it was hard because I'd say, `Let's do a story about this' and one of the writers would go, `Oh, they did that on "Law and Order" last week.' So it got kind of frustrating. With this, nobody else is doing it. It's not like I go, `Oh, what are they doing on "Walker, Texas Ranger?" ' " The fact that, even now, nobody else is doing quite what "Oz" does may account for its growing cachet among entertainers of all stripes. Actors from Steve Buscemi and Charles Busch to Uta Hagen and Elaine Stritch have performed on or directed the show, and rappers like Trech, Master P and Method Man have walked the prison's halls. Among the new season's guest stars are the Kiss drummer Peter Criss and the writer and actor Malachy McCourt. Mr. Fontana said that recently, within the same week, he had been told that Kid Rock was interested in appearing on the show and that the writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak was a fan."I thought, `From Kid Rock to Maurice Sendak ??at's the universe, as far as I can see.' "

This was the 2nd HBO.com interview
HBO: So tell us about Ryan.
DEAN: Oh yeah, my alter ego!
HBO: Is he really, totally opposite of you? No similarities?
DEAN: There's actually a lot of Ryan in me, which is one reason why I got the role. So umm... believe me. I mean, I wasn't feeding people glass or killing anybody.
HBO: Ha ha, right! Or, like, playing both sides against the middle.
DEAN: Well I've actually done that before [laughs], but sure, what do you wanna know about Ryan?
HBO: To start, tell us what most appealed to you about Ryan the character -- the part, how'd you get the part etc. you know standard stuff.
DEAN: I was doing a movie in L.A., CONSPIRACY THEORY, you know that one? HBO: Yep.
DEAN: Which if you look really hard you can barely find me in it [laughs], but while I was out there shooting it, Barry Levinson was shooting WAG THE DOG across the street, and I had worked on HOMICIDE a few times. Tom Fontana saw me on the set and said he and Barry were doing this OZ project for HBO and that they have this character, this Irish guy they wanted me to play and would I do it. And I was like "would I do it? What are you, crazy? Of course,I'll do it!" I was thrilled to take the part. However, the most appealing thing about Ryan to me was his basic survival instincts and how he's able to survive all kinds of situations 'cause you know he's a dirt bag, he's a cockroach, a manipulator...
HBO: [laughs] Yeah, that's true!
DEAN: [laughs] I mean, you know how it is, but let's not lose sight of what we're dealing with here. I mean we are in a prison environment, not a prep school, so the fact that Ryan's always able to stay one step ahead of everybody by doing everything he thinks is necessary and damn the consequences -- I mean who wouldn't want to play that? I've said this before, you know, I try to go through life being a pretty good person, but to be able to play somebody like Ryan is a dream because... I mean everyone at some point in their life gets pushed to the point of wanting to feed someone glass, or... [he laughs]
HBO: I hear you, I know exactly how you feel, you get mad enough to consider doing that...
DEAN: ...Or something similar, like hang someone from the rafters, or also as in this case, protect your brother. And being able to play an older brother to my real life brother... now that's a real gift.
HBO: So that answers another question, you two are related.
DEAN: Yeah we're real brothers.
HBO: He's older?
DEAN: Actually, I'm older. He's a year and two weeks younger than I am. It's a trip having him on the show.
HBO: Do you think the chemistry between Cyril and Ryan is because you two are great actors or more because of the familiarity that comes with being brothers? DEAN: Well, I wanna say its because we're great actors [laughs]. He's my brother and I love him more than anything, so, that was the one thing we really didn't have to act, you know. The feeling for each other we really didn't have to work on. In real life I would never have my brother go out and kill someone you know [laughs)].That's where the acting comes into play there. He's actually one of my favorite actors on the planet.
HBO: Now Dean, you know you've got lots female fans.
DEAN: Really? [laughs] Nah, you're kidding. HBO: Oh yeah and I mean they send LOADS of questions. Especially stuff about how much they love Ryan, how hot he is... you know the deal. Why do you think they have such love for this character who's obviously, as you say a cockroach, a scumbag?
DEAN: I just think it goes back to the... a... a... kind of a brute, caveman mentality about him. And I'm not saying that that's anything to be admired, but I think there is something interesting and appealing about that, especially now when everyone is so politically correct and so afraid to show how they really are or feel. I think when they see Ryan, they see some of the most basic "male" qualities, and there is something kind of attractive about that; maybe I'm reaching, I don't know. But I think, like when the whole thing went down with Dr. Nathan, I know it's a dark thing to say but, I mean would you fantasize about someone so in love with you that they'd do anything for you?
HBO: Yeah, I can see a person confessing their love for you so strongly but...
DEAN: ...But not to kill anyone! Don't get me wrong! Just to have someone feel love that strongly is incredible. I mean, as perverse as it seems, there is something appealing there. Even though Ryan did completely screw his brother over, it was because he was so blinded by the love for Dr. Nathan. And in the end, I think that the viewers really saw how much Ryan really cared for Cyril by wanting to protect him, and I think the women could be attracted to that.
HBO: You think Ryan and Dr. Nathan could get together?
DEAN: Naah, I don't think so. [laughing]
HBO: No chance at all huh.
DEAN: Not unless she has a lobotomy [laughs]. Hey, I would love nothing more than to explore that story line. Lauren Velez is such a beautiful and great actress; it would be a pleasure to explore that story. They haven't really told us what's going to happen, so its hard to say. Which is the beauty of the show: You don't ever find out what's up until you open the script and you say, "woah, what the hell is this? Can I really pull this off?" But because the whole OZ team and cast are so great, you get that push that let's you know you can pull it off.
HBO: Yeah, tell us about that, because fans wonder if the cast does influence how you approach playing Ryan.
DEAN: Oh yeah, definitely. Its like anything: You're only as good as the people you're working with -- and believe me, these I'm with (Lauren Velez, Terry Kinney, Ernie Hudson, etc.) are the damn best. I take such pride in being a part of this group of amazing actors. And working with them actually raises my performance level so I've gotta go in there and give the 200 percent to make Ryan as real as possible, especially since he's such a bad-ass and a complex character.
HBO: Well, you've convinced a lot of viewers. I mean OZ fans are on some serious dedication. They're all over our BBS about how pissed they are that the show's off, when will it be back, what's gonna happen to the characters, who should kick who's butt.
DEAN: Really? I can believe it though. The show just grabs you and keeps you watching. Like last night. Episode 7 from the first season was on, and I just got sucked into the show while watching it. And while I'm watching, I see Ryan O'Reilly and I don't recognize myself. I mean I'm sitting there watching and I'm like "hey I know that guy!" I mean isn't that crazy?
HBO: You're so crazy but it's true. One fan, said he loves Ryan's cockiness, like he's in control. Does Ryan really believe he runs the place, or is he frontin' and really just trying to watch his back?
DEAN: I think if he ever thought he ran the place, then he'd be in trouble. I think it's all about giving that impression of being in control, so he's gotta play that role. And it seems to be working 'cause OZ inmates believe him.
HBO: In the second season, Ryan got breast cancer. Tell us about that. What did you do to make it believable without being too corny or over the top?
DEAN: The possibilities were endless, and I was thrilled to do it. I mean think about it, Ryan goes through all this crap to establish himself up in this prison to where he's sort of becoming the man and then he gets this "women's" disease you know. I mean, on top of being afraid of dying, he has to be even more careful because he doesn't want the inmates to think he's weak. And we know what that gets you in prison! I actually spoke with some male breast cancer victims, and I'll tell you, it's tough as hell to have this life threatening disease and then have to go through the stigma and embarrassment of going to women's doctors, getting mammograms, and all. I mean it's so rough. As tough as it was, I was still thrilled to play the part and did everything I could to make Ryan ring true. That's why I shaved my head, lost all the weight and stuff. I'm not sure if the story has run it's course or not, I mean you never know, remission, and all.
HBO: So what's up with you now? Gonna stay here in NYC? Any new projects? DEAN: Well yeah. You know I was born here in NY. I was born on the east side, lived in Harlem when I was a kid.
HBO: Where in Harlem?
DEAN: 125th Street near Riverside Drive. I've lived everywhere in the city. I love this city. This city is my life's breath, but most of the work in this business is in California -- TV and all.
HBO: Think you'd do a sitcom?
DEAN: Hey, I'd love to do a sitcom. People aren't gonna watch me on OZ and then easily believe, "oh that guy's funny he could be a comedic actor" you know but yeah, a sitcom could work for me.
HBO: So you're not into getting typecast. Do you worry about that?
DEAN: Oh definitely, which is one of the reasons why I did this independent feature over the summer. This is a real nice family movie where I play this young dad, you know. I was just trying to see if I could pull one of those off, because it was so opposite of Ryan O' Reilly. Yeah you do worry about that, but I think I can pull it off. Tom (Fontana) and Barry (Levinson) are developing a TV show, so I'm gonna do that, I'll be playing a lawyer. So yeah, I'm working on playing a variety of roles so I don't get too typecast.
HBO: Any guesses on what Ryan's gonna be up to next season?
DEAN: Well the first season just came out of nowhere, you know; no one knew what to expect. And the second season just rocked with these fantastic stories. I suspect the third season to keep the pace going and be filled with some surprises. Of course, if I did know what was up I couldn't tell you here! [laughs]
HBO: Yeah, I figured that. [laughs]
DEAN: I will say this, I expect it to blow people away.
HBO: Even more than last season?
DEAN: Yeah, plus the fact that we only do about eight episodes a season, which I'm sure some of the fans don't like.
HBO: Oh yeah, they constantly yell for more episodes.
DEAN: Well, I think we can consistently give fans the impact they like OZ for with the eight episodes. To do a 15-to 20-episode season could take away from the strength of the stories.
HBO: Thanks again for the time Dean.
DEAN: No problem, my pleasure!

This was the 1st HBO.com Dean interview
HBO: Oz was an unqualified hit last season. Why do you think that is?
DEAN WINTERS: I think the reason is that this is a show about people that you would never want to spend five minutes with in the real world. And I think that the way it's written, it's so character driven, and that people end up becoming kind of fascinated with these stories. Because prison is really just a microcosm of the outside world. And I think like any good project, it starts with the writing, you know? And then when you get the actors, and the directors, and everyone else involved. But the writing is so good on this show that I think people just got hooked on it. It was such a taboo for television, and it was the first show of its kind. I think it just rocked people. And it dealt with issues in a very kind of unbiased way. Take the death penalty. Subjects like that were just treated very fairly, I think. But I think, basically, it was just tied in to the fact that everyone's, you know, in the show is a survivor. I think people, in a kind of perverse way, kind of respected that.
HBO: Yeah.
DEAN WINTERS: And, you know, no matter how bad you are in the show. There's a lot of bad guys. Everyone is basically looking out for themselves. And I think there's something kind of um, (SIGHS) well, the word I'm looking for is something kind of mysterious.
HBO: How does that affect you?
DEAN WINTERS: Well, you know, it's funny, because people have talked to me on the street and said all kinds of things. You know, like "how the fuck can you live with yourself?" And, I'm not a believer that you have to love a character that you play. But I think you have to have some kind of respect, or some kind of admiration for a certain quality of that character. And with me, I just think that I came in this prison, the only Irish guy around. And I didn't have, I didn't have the gang bangers. And I didn't have the Muslims. And I didn't have the Italians. And I just loved the way that it was written. You know just surviving, and I would do anything I could. And this, people will say to me, well, how could you do this, and how could you do that? And it's not like I'm in high school here, I'm in prison. You know? And so, everything I did was basically just watching out for myself. And the whole survival aspect, you got to respect that in someone. Someone that can, just do that, day to day.
HBO: Is it true that some of the scenes are really rough in this?
DEAN WINTERS: Yeah.
HBO: Don't you think? Is it physically demanding?
DEAN WINTERS: It's physically demanding. And very few people got hurt. I mean, every once in a while someone will slip with a punch. Or like in the riot scene. I think a couple of people got like a little whacked around. But as far as the violence goes it's also well choreographed. I think that the real problem is just kind of being lost in the moment. As opposed to getting lost the physicality of it. And you just kind of forget that you're supposed to be hitting your cues, and your marks. There was a lot of violence last year. And this year too, to a degree. But it's just a bunch of guys. It's like being in a big sand box, you know? And just kind of rough housing.
HBO: What else is going to be different? Without giving away too much of the season's show, how, how do you think this season is going to be different?
DEAN WINTERS: I think this season, it gets a little more cerebral. Instead of the kind of really in your face shock value. I'm not saying it was shock value. But in the, I think this year deals more with the issues of how these are men in prison who have been stripped of everything. So let's get past the violence, and let's get past the sex, and the drugs, and let's get into their minds. And I think this year, to become more cerebral and, and it just goes a lot deeper. And it peels a lot of layers this year. And it's just...a lot of layers.
HBO: Now this week, you guys are working with Kathy Bates?
DEAN WINTERS: Yeah.
HBO: An Academy award winning actress. And it's just on television for a show. How did you find her to work with?
DEAN WINTERS: She, she's amazing. She's the second director we've had this year who's an actor. We had Bob Ballaban a couple of weeks ago. And there's just something very nurturing and caring about them. Kathy has just been wonderful. And she just is able to kind of reach into you, and pull things out, you know? And this season has become a lot more emotionally demanding, I think, for a lot of the actors. And they're really had to go inside. And so, it helps to have someone like Kathy, because she's able to take you aside, and give you that kind of direction that you need to hear from someone like her. You know? Someone in her position.
HBO: And it helps to have someone like that?
DEAN WINTERS: Yeah. It, it helps to have someone like Kathy this year. Because they are peeling more layers, and it's going a lot deeper. And it's a very cold environment. And so you need a director like Kathy, because she's able to contact your side, and talk to you as an actor, and really reach in. And this place is just like, there's a lot of testosterone in here, and lot of posturing, and a lot of posing, and it's great. It all helps with the show. But when you have to go inside, and do some real looking, then it helps to have someone like Kathy around. And she's, I mean, balls to the wall, she's a tough woman. Man, she's great, you know? And she knows what she wants. And it's like she's not getting pushed around here at all.
HBO: How long do you work on Oz, I mean, what time do you quit?
DEAN WINTERS: Because it's an ensemble show, I think most of the guys in the show, and the girls, we work about anywhere from four to six days an episode. An episode is usually seven days. But they're long days, you know? And when you're dealing with a prison show, it's definitely demanding. I mean, I remember when I was younger, I used to hear actors talk about how tired they were, at the end of the day. And I would always be like what a bunch of crap. [LAUGHS] You know? But coming out of here, I go home and (SMACKS HIS HAND) and I'm out.
HBO: How do you wind up being in this kind of environment?
DEAN WINTERS: I just go out, and I beat somebody up. [LAUGHTER] No, just, it's a tough place, not to bring home sometimes, you know? And I think in the first season, I remember coming home, and definitely bringing my work home with me. I wasn't like feeding glass to my girlfriend, or like kicking my dad's [LAUGHS] but, it was, now I've learned to just kind of, at the end of the day, just hang out with some of the guys in the back. And maybe tell a couple of jokes, or go have a beer, and just kind of relax. Because it is a job that you definitely, it's hard to shake it, you know? You're here for twelve hours a day, with a hundred guys. And you're doing a whole thing. You just don't walk out the door, and go "yep, I'm going home now."
HBO: Tell me about Tommy? Working with Tommy?
DEAN WINTERS: Fontana?
DEAN WINTERS: As a man? He's great. I've known Tom for a long time. I've worked with him, I worked with him on Homicide, and I did a pilot, an