Even as a high school thespian, Michael Shannon conveyed gravitas. "I would always play the old guy; I guess I had a good old-guy voice," he says. Over the telephone, his gravelly timbre does make him seem older than his baby-faced 36 years.
As Nelson Van Alden on HBO's Boardwalk Empire -- a gritty confection of organized crime in 1920s Atlantic City created by The Sopranos' Terence Winter and executive-produced by Martin Scorsese -- that deep voice serves Shannon well. He plays a federal agent tasked with enforcing Prohibition, the so-called "good guy" whose personal faith and unrelenting drive for justice...read more