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Maybe for you in America, Dr. King has become boring because you hear about him so much. But for me, he is the man who has most inspired me.

When Dr. King was murdered, I had no idea who he was. But as soon as I heard his words on television that night when I was 9 years old, I was dumbstruck, awestruck by their power.

Everyone puts all of the advances that we've made on Dr. King, but there's a lot of people who were part of the civil rights movement.

We have to remember that Dr. King was not an idle dreamer. Dr. King was a man of action. If Dr. King were here, he would challenge us and exhort us.

I had always known that I couldn't play Dr. King purely out of my own ability as an actor. When you look at him give those speeches, you can tell that he is taken up by something other than himself. He is flowing with an anointing that is directly from God.

Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been the last person to have wanted his iconization and his heroism. He was an enormously guilt-laden man. He was drenched in a sense of shame about his being featured as the preeminent leader of African-American culture and the civil rights movement.

My role on television is one of helping people reexamine the assumptions that they hold. I regard Dr. King. You would never hear me get up and speak without in some way, shape or form, referencing, Dr. King.

Elvis was the king. No doubt about it. People like myself, Mick Jagger and all the others only followed in his footsteps.

It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.

Dr. King's general principles are universal. But the things he confronted took place in another era.