"The Iceman Cometh," starring Denzel Washington, is nominated for eight Tony Awards this year, but for director George C. Wolfe it wasn't a project he originally thought he would take on. The five-time Tony Award-winning director and playwright revealed on "Salon Talks" that if he was going to direct a revival of the Eugene O'Neill classic, the project needed to have risk, and at first, he couldn't pinpoint any big artistic challenges.

That all changed when he read O'Neill again. Wolfe told Salon's executive editor Andrew O'Hehir, "Iceman is a slight departure, I normally don't like doing revivals because I figure, you know, always when I do a play there's gotta be an equation of risk and potential failure, you know, and when you're working on a new play, it's like, how do I do this and do we have the time and, so all of these huge questions engage, I think the, hopefully, the smartest part of me, and then when you're doing the revival, well somebody's already solved it. But then, so what do I have to offer for it?"