Actors

Actress Zooey Deschanel has made a move from the big screen to the indie-rock stage, recently co-founding the group She and Him. Deschanel joins Fresh Air to discuss her music and her band's new album, Volume One.

The actor won an Academy Award for his performance in Spike Jonze's Adaptation. His latest project is Married Life, about a 1940s philanderer who still loves his wife — enough, in fact, to kill her rather than divorce and disappoint her.

Canadian actor and comedian Mark McKinney joins Terry Gross to discuss his career, including Slings and Arrows, the critically acclaimed miniseries about a Shakespearean theater troupe. It's out now in a DVD box.

Actor Bryan Cranston — best known as the dad on Fox TV's Malcolm in the Middle talks to Terry Gross about his newest role. He plays a meth-cooking high-school chemistry teacher in Breaking Bad, a new series on AMC.

On HBO's The Wire, actor Michael K. Williams plays Omar Little, a stick-up guy who robs only drug dealers. Omar has a scar running down his face. That's not a prosthetic scar; it's real. Williams tells Terry Gross the story behind his scar — and lots of other stories about himself and Omar.

Clark Johnson has worked as a director on several of TV's most memorable cop shows, including The Shield, Homicide: Life on the Street and the pilot episode of the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire. This season, he's appearing on camera as well, as The Wire's City Editor Gus Haynes.

In Paul Thomas Anderson's new film There Will Be Blood, the young actor Paul Dano plays a rural preacher at odds with the oilman (Daniel Day-Lewis) at the center of the story. Dano previously appeared in Little Miss Sunshine, playing the teen who was an elective mute.

Denzel Washington directs and stars in the new film The Great Debaters, inspired by the true story of Wiley College's winning debate team of the early 1930s. The film also stars Forest Whitaker.

Say "Christopher Plummer," and some people automatically think of The Sound of Music, in which he played the Baron von Trapp.

But that's just one of about 100 films Plummer has been in; recent highlights from his big-screen career include Syriana, The Insider, A Beautiful Mind, and Inside Man. He's also had long stage career, won two Tony Awards, and performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Gone Baby Gone, a new film based on the Dennis Lehane novel, stars actor Casey Affleck as a blue-collar private investigator drawn into a child-abduction case. The film is directed by Affleck's movie-star brother, Ben Affleck.

Casey Affleck has also appeared in the American Pie films, Ocean's 11 and its sequels, and Good Will Hunting.