Gun Shy

May 19, 2026, late afternoon. I stepped out onto the streets of Washington, DC. It’s a beautiful, culturally rich city full of brilliant minds, stunning art, and tight knit communities. It is also the despoiled nesting ground of the vile leech at the heart of a dying empire. These worlds mesh through one another and the atmosphere generated at their intersection is an eldritch fever fugue.

I was leaving a friend’s place, standing on the sidewalk, waiting for a car to take me home. Looking forward to taking a long walk with my wife to a movie theater to catch The Sheep Detectives.

That’s where I was when I got the text from a friend. I rushed to check the news to have it confirmed and re-confirmed. Manchester City’s game with Bournemouth had ended a draw. Arsenal, with a game to spare, were Premier League champions. As a kid, I heard tales of this legendary team from my father, and I gathered occasional news snippets and highlights from whatever corners I could find them. But it wasn’t easy watching European sports in the US at the time, and I didn’t seriously join the Arsenal community until about 2008.

I shared the news with my Uber driver and we chattered throughout the brief ride. I watched the reactions continue to pour in until the lights dimmed in the theater, and I enjoyed the movie in contented peace. They’d finally done it. In spite of chronic injury crises, in spite of Manchester City’s infinite money chute, in spite of the doubt and scorn and jeers of millions of detractors worldwide, the team I’d followed through so much Almost had broken through.

Almost, for a long time, felt like the thread linking me to Arsenal. It was a kinship bond. Arsenal was always good and never the best. Arsenal had undeniable talent and skill and did beautiful work. They also lacked a certain edge, the killer instinct required to dominate high level competition where the margins are thin enough to see through. They had a knack and a love for what they did, and they worked hard, but a certain drive, that near mystical afterburner kick, wasn’t quite there.

Being an actor requires you to get familiar with yourself in a way that most people understandably spend a lot of time dodging, many all the way to their relieved graves. I’ve long been aware of the fact that Arsenal and I share some characteristics. In some ways, it was more comfortable to follow a team that was flat out abject. I’m a Knicks fan, and yeah, it’s weird that they’re good now, but that’s for another self-reflective processing session. I was with them through all the dismal years. Their utter poverty of ability and achievement pained me in itself, but it didn’t feel like a spiritual tether to my own life the way Arsenal’s almost-ness did.

I’m good at what I do, I love and value it and work hard at it. But there’s a fundamental ferocity that I do not possess and have spent a lot of my life trying to balance and compensate for in other ways.

Arsenal, for most of my time following them, were a very nice team. Sweet lads with a kind coach. In Arsene Wenger’s patient nod, in Theo Walcott’s brilliant smile, in the gentle flow of their passing game, the team came across as good people. They were the opposite of Jose Mourinho’s cold cutthroat Chelsea or the vicious bruisers in Stoke City. Arsenal’s kindness could be a strength. It created a strong team bond, a group of people who supported each other, who played the game because they loved it and loved to express themselves through it. At other times, opponents’ aggression would cut through their sweetness like a croissant on a table saw. Like when a Stoke player shattered Aaron Ramsey’s leg and put him out for a season and a half.

I’ve always been too kind for my own good. It led to a lot of advantage being taken of me when I was younger. It’s still true, even if repeated wounds taught me how to shore up my defenses more effectively. A lot of what people who’ve met me in adulthood may take as inherent is actually the result of years of striving not to be trapped within my natural attributes.

I can speak well with charm and wit because of decades of training and practice that started because I was naturally too quiet and shy and awkward to be around people. If you’ve spent enough time with me and watched me tire out enough, you’ve seen those trained skills deplete and flake off the shy kid who still lives beneath them, the same way an athlete, however good, will eventually tire out and lose their technique until they rest. My love of fighting and swordsmanship stems from a need to build with study and practice a capacity for aggression that I otherwise never had.

Of course, this kind of patchwork self repair is universal. Adulthood is a fiction that each person builds to fill in the gaps in their child selves. But it’s always interesting to observe how our interests reflect ourselves, and Arsenal has been just such a red and white mirror.

Arsenal played beautiful football. Artistically satisfying, with brio and verve to the brim. That won them many games, some of them against the best teams in the world. And year upon year, other teams would best them to the title. Teams that played grim, harsh, unrelenting football. Teams that played beautiful football like Arsenal but with a wolf edge, a beauty whose nose had been sanded flush by the grindstone.

I have some accomplishments that plenty of actors and writers spend whole careers shy of. I’ve seen my books on the shelf at Barnes & Noble and public libraries. I’ve been in an award nomination slate with the actor who played Q in Star Trek(neither of us won it). I’ve had work published by the writer who invented the word ‘cyberpunk.’ Currently, I make a living performing and teaching Shakespeare.

But there’s a feeling that I ascended one step, lifted my foot to take the second, and found my toe against a wall. Plenty have clawed their way through such an impediment. But I may suffer from an abundance of ruth. My claws may not be keen enough for the task.

Arsenal taught me something else, though. Winning isn’t all killer instinct and aggression. Those qualities may be overhyped in society nowadays. This title didn’t spring fully formed from the ground when the team sharpened their teeth one day. You can trace this path back a decade and see a foundation laid brick by brick.

Mikel Arteta’s arrival as a player in 2011, setting himself up to know the team and learn the skills he’d bring back when he returned as a coach. Signing Mesut Özil in 2013(I still remember exactly where I was), a signal that Arsenal was serious about bringing in the top tier. Aaron Ramsey returning from an injury that would’ve rung the death knell of most careers, and having one of the most heroic seasons I’ve ever seen from an athlete.

All of that led to Arsenal lifting the FA Cup in 2014. It wasn’t the Premier League, but it was a major achievement and a sorely needed celebration. They reclaimed that prize several more times in following years. They’d hoisted themselves to a new level. Those victories laid the foundation upon which the new team could be built. This year’s league triumph could never have happened without the longer, slower work of prior years, and above all, without patience.

Patience is something I have. My fangs may not be the sharpest, but they dig and hold and don’t chip. At times I take a circuitous route. At times, when a sensible person would turn right and walk a mile, I turn left and walk around the world to the same spot.

Arsenal have helped me realize that instead of emotionally flensing myself for not having the qualities I don’t have, I need to build my strategies around the ones I do have. I don’t have a final conclusion to this because, like Arsenal, I’m not at the end of the path, I’m in the middle. There’s plenty of steps ahead, steps to experiment, to build, to play, and to dream.

And then, in the midst of writing this long piece, the Knicks took that title they were pushing towards when I put the first words down. Maybe there’ll be a part two. We’ll see. There’s always more space to play down the path.