Actor and writer Eric Bogosian first bubbled up from the cultural stew that was late-’70s New York with the Ricky Paul Show, an act in which he played an obnoxious comedian/abhorrent lounge singer who wore a plaid suit and instigated physical confrontation with his audience. Antagonistic, aggressive, and rough around the edges, the Ricky Paul Show was the theatrical manifestation of punk.

Over the next couple of years, the “guys in Eric’s head” started multiplying, each clamoring for stage time of their own. Simultaneously, at the tail end of a “kind of Robert Mitchum way of relating to women,” Eric met his wife, director Jo Bonney, who would go on to become his closest and most essential collaborator, directing him in six one-man shows that revolutionized American theater. The “solos”—Men Inside; Funhouse; Drinking in America; Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll; Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; and Wake Up and Smell the Coffee—introduced theater audiences to Eric’s chameleonic, visceral acting style and his dark, hilarious, and radical writing.

Part Andy Kaufman, part Lenny Bruce, part good old-fashioned transformational character actor, Eric brought shock jocks, spaced-out drug dealers, Hollywood producers, New Age gurus, rock stars, homeless guys, and traveling salesmen to the stage, infusing each with his trademark fearless, acerbic, provocative, and insanely insightful wit. Chaotic, visceral, precise, and totally contemporary, his solos spawned a whole new genre of theater.

Eric has gone on to write multicharacter plays (Griller, Talk Radio, Humpty Dumpty, subUrbia), adapt two of those (Talk Radio and subUrbia) into films with Oliver Stone and Richard Linklater, respectively, and write screenplays, teleplays, and novels (Mall and Wasted Beauty). He also works constantly as an actor in film, theater, and TV, playing characters from Lebanese drug dealer/John Holmes buddy Eddie Nash (Wonderland) to world-conquering evil bad guy Travis Dane (Under Siege 2) to McCarthy-esque senator Larson Crockett (Witch Hunt) to Satan (Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play The Last Days of Judas Iscariot) for directors as diverse as Robert Altman, Lizzie Borden, Atom Egoyan, Woody Allen, Paul Schrader, and Oliver Stone.

This year, he has been added to the long list of great New York actors to star in the Law & Order franchise, as Captain Danny Ross on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Jo Bonney recently directed an updated production of subUrbia off-Broadway, and Talk Radio is currently being revived on Broadway.

We first met Eric when he acted off-Broadway in our play The Exonerated....