Ryan O'Reilly I actually posted this in a different thread, but I love this story and I didn't know how many people actually were aware of it. So I thought some might find it interesting

My favorite part of Dean Winters character is that it was written by Fontana especially for him. The story goes that Dean Winters who worked in a bar on New York's Upper East Side with his brother Scott, who would go on to play Dean's mentally disabled on-screen brother Cyril in the show. This was in 1992, when Dean was a jobbing actor who was all but ready to give up on his career, until Fontana – who occasionally drank in Winters' bar – visited him on the set of the Mel Gibson political thriller Conspiracy Theory. Winters said "I was in my trailer, and I really didn't think the acting life was for me," "Tom came in and said, 'Listen, don't quit just yet – I'm doing this little experimental show for HBO; it's their first cable show and I've written you this really incredible role.' Tom really based my part on two things: the character Iago from Othello, and watching me bartend. When I was a bartender I had this mantra in my head: 'If you leave my bar with cab fare, then I've failed.' I think there was a whole kind of stew there that Tom saw between those two worlds, and that's how the character of Ryan O'Reilly was born."