Terence Winter is best known for his work on “The Sopranos” and creating “Boardwalk Empire,” but the 55-year-old writer and TV showrunner wasn't just handed those gigs.
Like most in Hollywood, he had to start from the bottom, and he built off his early jobs to become one of the most sought-after writers in not only TV but also movies — his adaptation of Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” earned him an Oscar nomination.
Leading up to the Sunday premiere of his new series, "Vinyl," which he created with Scorsese, Mick Jagger, and Rich Cohen, Winter talked to Business Insider about his landmark career so far.
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“The Cosby Mysteries”
One of the first writing jobs Winter scored when he got to Hollywood in the mid-1990s was writing episodes for the blink-and-you-missed-it crime series “The Cosby Mysteries.” That’s right, Bill Cosby had a show in which he played a retired New York criminologist who would solve murders in his spare time.
“That time in my career I was just thrilled that people were offering me to do jobs,” Winter said.
According to Winter, Cosby couldn’t be any nicer to work with, but the legendary comedian's style wasn’t the right fit for the murder-mystery genre.
“One of the conventions of the murder mystery is that the hero at the end sort of runs down very specifically how he caught the murderer,” Winter said. “So we’d have these very specific speeches written where Bill would explain how he knew who the murderer was, but instead he would go off on these comedic riffs that often had nothing to do with how he caught the murderer. So we would get the footage back and go, 'Um, what?' We would have to loop dialogue somewhere else in the episode so the ending would make sense. It was kind of a challenge.”
“Xena: Warrior Princess”
Soon after “The Cosby Mysteries,” Winter grabbed another job, writing for a new show called “Xena: Warrior Princess.”
The show that would become a global hit wasn’t necessarily what Winter wanted to write about, but the experience of seeing a show come together from the ground up was immeasurable.
“I was there when they were in the very early stages of developing the show and trying to figure out who the characters were. It was fascinating to observe that,” Winter said. “The challenge for me was that is a very specific world, but that’s where work ethic comes in. You’re not connected to this material but you’re hired to do a job, now figure it out.”
His next job would finally get him into his dream material.
“The Sopranos”
The HBO masterpiece put Winter on the map as he came on as one of the writers for its second season in 2000. He would go on to be an executive producer on the show in years to come.
But that wouldn't have been possible if the show’s creator, David Chase, had just gone by Winter’s credits.
“He didn’t care what your credits were. He could have gone, ‘Oh, you were on "Xena"?’ But he didn’t care,” Winter said. “He was interested in me as a person, the stories I had, what made me tick. It’s something to this day I do when I hire people. I’m not interested in someone’s credits. Let me see who you are and tell me a story of your life.”
See the rest of the story at Business Insider