Absolutely everything I've done - my research, my training, my book - was made possible due to Harvard opening doors and providing me with connections.
While I had no intention of ending the series after 'The Spellmans Strike Again,' I did close many doors in that book and, with the fifth one, I was opening a lot of doors and not finding anything behind them and then opening another door and another until I found something. It was a while before I found my stride.
I want to invest in research. Research is great. Providing funding to universities and think tanks is great. But investing in companies? Absolutely not.
I had a certificate that said, 'Doctor of Mixology, Harvard University,' that I actually got from Harvard University. A friend of mine was a research assistant over there and it was one of those student or university perks and she brought me in on that. So I am a doctorate from Harvard and it only took me one afternoon.
Everything shifted for me after 'Rush.' It wasn't as financially successful as other things I'd done, but it gave me more movement, more options, more doors opening, more meetings. All of a sudden, it's, 'Oh, wow! You're an actor!'
David Tennant is a massive fan, and grew up dreaming he would be the Doctor Who one day. So I did feel, when I first got the job, "Right, now I've got to do loads of research into absolutely everything Doctor Who." But that's not possible to do in a short space of time. So my knowledge has been growing and developing as I've been doing it, and that's been fine. That's been appreciated by the fans, and the executives never expect me to be brushed up on absolutely everything.
Working on domestic violence cases was an eye-opening experience that made me passionate to do everything possible to support and protect victims and prosecute abusers.
While its [Harvard's] undergraduate life was still controlled [in 1908-1912] by a select group of rich and fashionable families whose sons merely arrived when they were due to fill the places that had been waiting for them from the day they were born, it was, at the same time, opening its doors to a more cosmopolitan student population and beginning to take the first tentative steps toward mitigating the evils of a pyramidal social system that concentrated all its social honors upon the rich and the wellborn.
When I graduated, I was told I was the first Latino to have three graduate degrees from Harvard. And Harvard does something amazing to you. It opens the doors to the world.
Everything has been done. It's not possible to create something completely new, something that has never been seen before. It's only possible to make new combinations, establish new connections between things we usually take for granted.
Nearly everything faith-related that I have done at Harvard has been followed by free food, from going to services at Harvard's Episcopal Chaplaincy to attending a day of interfaith discussion and dialogue hosted by the university chaplains in the fall.
I'm publicizing the book that's done. I'm writing the book that's in the hopper, and I'm doing a little advance research on the book to come.
One book at a time... though I'm usually doing the research for others while I'm writing, but that sort of research is fairly desultory and I like to stick to the book being written - and writing a book concentrates the mind so the research is more productive.
Book marketing is like opening doors for your readers to find you, not a stick you hit them with.
When I was in law school at Harvard, the Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA) in the U.S. was a big thing. I remember the fight between the army recruiters and Harvard University due to 'Don't ask, don't tell.'
That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.
Everything that I had done creatively related to two or three incidents that happened to me when I was a child that I'd forgotten. Everything, absolutely everything.