I was the adoring son of a Welsh-Irish father, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a Catholic Knight of Columbus who was a blue-collar, trade union organizer and, not surprisingly, a fervid Nixon-hater.

And I'm a Catholic, from an Irish Catholic family, and we know plenty of stuff about guilt.

In film roles, I play a lot of heavies and a lot of bad guys, so I tend to be the jokester and the good-time Charlie on the set.

As a matter of fact, I decided in high school that I was going to go to the seminary. And I did study with the Paulist Fathers for two years after high school in full anticipation of becoming a priest.

My first presidential primary vote was for Bobby Kennedy.

Among the roles Ive played on stage, television and in films were politicos as diverse as Abe Lincoln, Juan Peron, Herman Goering, George Wallace and both Roosevelts.

Most people recognize me from The Shawshank Redemption, but there is this subculture of people who have collected all 13 episodes of Greg The Bunny. And I'm still close to a number of the creative people, Dan Milano particularly, who created Warren The Ape and Greg The Bunny and all of those characters.

Lyndon Johnson may have escalated the war, but when I was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, the signature on my orders was Nixon's.

I'm not a big comic fan and I'm not a big fan of comic movies.