Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Showtime's Sleeper Cell is its authenticity. The show goes to great lengths to ensure it accurately portrays a terrorist cell operating inside the United States. Much of the credit for that accuracy goes to Michael Desante, who serves as the Islamic and Arabic advisor for the show and plays FBI Agent Alim Saleh. We recently talked to Desante about his life and both roles on the show.

Where are you originally from and where do you call home now?
I grew up in Europe. I came here when I was 18 and I've been living in L.A. for the past 16 or 17 years.

What made you decide to move out to L.A.?
My acting career. The United States has always been a fascinating place for me. Growing up I'd watch movies and really be inspired by what I saw. I've been into the arts since I was four or five years old. I've been very drawn to it and that's why I came here.

How did you decide this is what you wanted to do for a living?
It's always a scary thing to get into in the beginning because you question whether you have what it takes or not. At some point, you kind of just have to make a decision and take a leap of faith. I came here to go to college, but I didn't take any drama courses. I took those in my spare time in the evenings, so I had dual things going on. I had a business degree I was pursuing and my acting career. So I had an insurance policy, so to speak.

What was it like early on in your acting career? Was it really tough to land roles?
Yeah, it was pretty tough. Being ethnic and being foreign, I was not one of the most sought after actors. Therefore, to break into the market, you had to have something a little extra - a little edge. I took it upon myself to be extra good and kind of upped the ante a little bit.

Through networking and meeting people and doing as much theater and workshops as I could, I broke into the business that way. Sometimes you have to do things that you really don't feel like you want to do, but you have to because you have to get the exposure.

Was there ever a point where you thought about giving it up or you thought it wasn't going to work out?
There were lots of points. The constant rejection when you are starting out really chips away at you. There comes a point when you question whether you should or should not continue on in a career that's very questionable, so to speak. Two years after I graduated with my MBA, I had to take a leap and say, "This is what I love to do and this is what I have to do and I don't want to be in a big corporate environment." Therefore, I decided to go the other route and concentrate on my acting career.

You said being ethnic was a hindrance to you early on in your career, but it actually was a benefit to you for Sleeper Cell because you ended up becoming the Islamic and Arabic advisor for the show. How did you end up with that job and what exactly does it entail?
What happened was, they had an offer out to another actor for one of the leads - a name actor, Oded Fehr. Oded had not decided to do the show yet, they were still in negotiations. So they were still seeing some people for that role and I was one of the people that they saw. They were pretty impressed and they called me back after Oded did sign the contract and offered me another job, which was to help them on the set and they liked what I did in the audition and they offered me a role based on that, which was not as big as the other role, but just as significant and had it's own storyline.

What exactly does your job as an advisor for the show entail?
Oh boy, I'll tell you, it's not an easy job. You are basically producing the show, but you are producing it on a niche, meaning that you are in charge of something that requires authentication - whether it be the language, the culture, the costumes, the mannerisms, coaching the dialects, coaching the actual language for the actors, scouting locations. You name it; I had to do it because if you want to make it authentic, you have to cross the t's and make sure that everything is done right.

A typical week would be a better question. I would review the script. I would make some suggestions and changes as far as the cultural Islamic or Arabic content in there, then go back to the writers and talk to them about it. They decide what they want to do about it and once we have a revised script that has a better angle on the authenticity side, then I would be consulting with the casting people and the actors themselves, training them on the dialogue - whether it be a prayer or a statement or a certain way of doing something. And then I would go to the costume department and go through the variety of different costumes that are needed for that episode, whether it be in Yemen or Saudi Arabia or Bahrain or wherever they happen to be shooting for that script.

Then they would have me in the production meetings and we'd go over the episode as a whole and each person in charge of their area would have to ask me what they need to know, basically. I'm like the encyclopedia, so to speak. The prop department would ask me, "Would this person have this item in their room?" That kind of thing. Everything is very detail oriented. I don't think anyone has gone as far as we have on Sleeper Cell to make something so authentic and we've gotten a lot of praise for it, especially overseas.

Is it common knowledge for you or do you have to do a lot of research to find the answers to their questions?
Some of it is common knowledge; a lot of it is not - especially the religious philosophical stuff. I'm not a practicing Muslim, so I'm not a person who can hypothetically tell you what my view is on a chapter in the Koran. That's not something I studied. Therefore, I have different sources and intellectuals that I call on that would help me in that department. But I can translate it into an everyday, understandable idea.

For example, if they wanted to use a passage from the Koran to justify a plotline, then I'll go back and ask at least two or three people their opinion on that passage and their interpretations, because everybody will interpret something differently. And then collectively I'll make a judgment call to see what would be an understandable common denominator that can be used in the episode. I reduce something that is at a PhD level to an eighth grade elementary level, so that people can understand it.

Is it a job you really enjoy? Is it something you have really embraced?
It's a tough job. I basically embraced it because I felt Islam is kind of a misunderstood religion. A lot of people have made a judgment call on Islam as a whole. Recently there was a survey asking the American people in general what they thought of Islam and I think 70 percent viewed Islam negatively just because of the terrorists and the Iraq war and many different legitimate reasons. But I think that people forget really Islam in its pure sense is a religion of peace and people don't understand that unless they investigate it themselves. It's a controversial topic because some people politicize it and use it to their advantage to brainwash people into doing terrorist acts and killing innocent people. I think the people at the top don't get their hands dirty. They talk their subordinates into believing something that's political and use religion to get them to carry out suicide missions that are senseless.

When you started working with the cast and crew, did they have a lot of misconceptions about Islam?
The writers have actually been pretty good. We have one Muslim writer on staff named Kamran Pasha and he kind of kept the writing department and the producers informed. I dealt with the cast and informed them.

Most of the cast members were pretty knowledgeable. They tried to find out for themselves what it took to portray the characters and most of the characters are Muslims, so they had to kind of immerse themselves in that environment to truly understand it. Coming from an acting point of view, I could spoon feed them in a way that they could understand it as actors because I'm an actor myself and I know how I work.

Did you actually teach the cast members how to speak Arabic or did you just teach them the correct pronunciation?
I taught them how to speak the language, not completely, but for what they needed to say - phonetically and understanding what they are saying. The emphasis in the Arabic language is on certain speech patterns - its not just about the phonetical sound, its how you pronounce it and how the fluctuations are to portray the meaning you intended it to portray. So you can't really teach Arabic unless you know what you are saying.

Who picked it up the easiest and who struggled a little bit more?
Michael Ealy picked it up very easily. Oded Fehr picked it up quite easily - he has a Hebrew background, so everything Hebrew is closely related. And Henri Lubatti picked it up easily, he's got a good ear in general and he works very hard on what he does. Some actors picked it up easily, some had a harder time. But most of the time, I think people got it right.

In addition to consulting, you play Alim Saleh on the show. That character is based on real-life FBI Agent Ali Soufan. What can you tell us about Soufan and about your character on the show?
Recently, the New Yorker magazine had an article about him and his involvement pre-9/11 and after 9/11. He was a young FBI agent, just a couple of years out of Quantico and he was sent to Yemen to investigate the USS Cole bombing and be in charge of it, which is unheard of in the FBI. But he had a unique way of reaching people in Arabic culture because he spoke the language and knew the religion himself and he can reach out and relate to the people that he needed cooperation from and was very successful.