J. Michael Straczynski is a screenwriter, television polymath, comic book writer, and novelist, and one of four speakers at our next Seriously Entertaining show, This Is Not the End, on September 20. Prolific doesn’t really cover his output. Indeed, the 34 writing credits on his IMDb page only hint at the extraordinary range and volume of his work, which includes the vast majority of Babylon 5‘s 110 episodes (he created the show), the 2008 Clint Eastwood movie Changeling (for which he was nominated for a BAFTA), zombie-apocalypse epic World War Z, seven instalments of Murder She Wrote, and, alongside co-creators the Wachowskis, the entirety of last year’s Sense8, one of Netflix’s most ambitious and successful original productions. Ahead of September’s show, we spoke to Joe about getting drunk with Nixon, the length of the working day, and why Peter O’Toole would be the ideal candidate to record his collected works. Name: J. Michael Straczynski. My friends call me Joe. People who don’t like me also call me Joe. I find this vaguely disquieting. Age: Physically: 62. Intellectually: mid-30s. Emotionally: a very shy 12. (There won’t be any girls reading this, will there?) Where are you from? Technically I was born in Paterson, NJ, but my father was a notorious deadbeat […]