The Shield's hard-as-nails, Michael Chiklis has a soft spot for his Boston home.
Michael Chiklis can't remember a time when he wasn't a Boston Red Sox fan. Just talking about Fenway Park makes his trademark raspy voice go soft. "There's no better place to see a baseball game," he says. "To know it is to love it." As Vic Mackey, the magnetic, Machiavellian L.A. cop at the center of The Shield, Chiklis has earned a reputation as a bruiser with a Bruce Willis smirk. In real life, Chiklis ("Chikie" to his friends) is a family man with a big laugh and a serious soft spot for Boston, the city he still calls home, even though he hasn't lived there in two decades. And nothing gets him nostalgic like talking about America's pastime. "Fenway Park is a home-run hitter's venue, a defender's nightmare," he says. "It's got all kinds of holes in it, places where you can hit a ball, and it's a real problem for the outfielders." He rattles this off with the ease of a man who has had this conversation before, over a pint or four at the Cask 'n Flagon, the sports bar where everyone is welcome (except Yankees fans). "The Sox have always been a heavy-hitting team, but we're better defensively now," he says. Then he stops for a moment. "Listen to me. I sound like I'm doing an interview for ESPN."

Chiklis was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, but when he was five, his family moved to Andover, the very pink of New England's prep school culture' something of a shift for Chiklis's middle-class family. "It's a Waspy town, and we were a Greek family who moved on up," he says. "But it was cool. I was sort of a street urchin who got educated."­ Chiklis was five or six years old when he announced his life's ambition: to become an actor. "And my parents were like, 'Sure, next week you'll want to be a fireman,'?" he says.