After his family moved back to the United States, Miller was raised in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York long before it became the chichi hipster enclave it is today.  “We had all kinds of people. You’re rubbing elbows with just about every race, creed and religion on the subway. It was just not an issue. It wasn’t until I got to college (Princeton), where everyone is going through that process of “Who am I?” and then “Who are you?”- That’s when people started asking about my ethnicity. Why do you look so exotic? Why are you from Brooklyn, but you don’t have an accent? People were eager to pigeonhole me.” As a kid, Wentworth’s nickname was “Stinky”. "Stinky" is a reference to his sarcasm. While Princeton, his friends gave him the nickname as a way of getting back at him. 

The family moved to Sewickley before Miller senior year in high school. His parents had been looking for a while to move out of the city, because they were concerns about raising children in an urban environment. There is a certain pace of life in New York City that can be exhausting and the children had been there for 13 years. 

"So I graduated with my degree in English from Princeton in 1995 and I moved out to Los Angeles  because I didn't want to teach, and I was still in love with TV and film, and I thought 'Well, I'll be behind the scenes, then.' started working in development for a little company that made movies for television. Development translated into faxing and filing and walking the boss' dog and going to Subway with the order for the boss' lunch and all kinds of glamorous stuff.”

Miller was raised with a certain work ethic. “If you are going to do a job, do it well and no half-way measures. I was the best temp I could be and the best book clerk I could be.”
"But every weekend I would go in to the office because I didn't have air conditioning and it was hot, and I would hang out in the conference room and kinda set up camp and raid the company kitchen. [I would] just watch all our footage that we had on video coming back from various production sites. And the juices started flowing, and I realized I still had this 'what if' question to answer. I was looking at my CD collection every month to see what I wouldn’t mind hocking to pay the rent. And I realized I needed acting like I needed air and couldn’t walk away from it”.  

Dinotopia, the epic story of a lost continent where dinosaurs and humans live together in an almost-utopian world, is brought to life as one of the most lavish productions in the history of American television. A six-hour miniseries, Dinotopia is based on the best-selling books by author/illustrator James Gurney.

Frank Scott (Stuart Wilson), a wealthy American, appears to perish when his plane crashes into the Caribbean. His two teenaged sons, Karl (Tyron Leitso) and David (Wenthworth Miller), survive, and find themselves stranded on Dinotopia, a fanstastic lost continent where humans and dinosaurs peacefully co-exist.

Dinotopia's colorful human inhabitants include resident rogue Cyrus Crabb (David Thewlis), a descendant of shipwrecked pirates, who lives as an outlaw in the utopian society; smart, beautiful Marion (Katie Carr), who is in training to be a matriarch and leader of her people; Marion's father, Mayor Waldo (Jim Carter), overseer of Dinotopia's spectacular capital, Waterfall City; her mother, revered matriarch Rosemary (Alice Krige) and Oonue (Colin Salmon), commander of the Skybax Corps (humans that train to fly huge Pterosaurs with 30-foot wingspans).

Marion — who captures both Karl's and David's hearts — leads the brothers to Waterfall City, where Mayor Waldo has them enrolled in the capital's academy so they can learn to become Dinotopians. They're soon befriended by the talkative Zippo, an academic Stenonychosaurus who speaks 17 human and Saurian languages. Upon receiving their assignments, cyncial Karl is charged with overseeing the birth of an infant Chasmosaurus named 26. David — terrified of heights — must undergo Skybax training on the frontier of Dinotopia, Canyon City.

The brothers soon discover that the sunstones, a force of life for Dinotopia, are failing, and the world may soon be plunged into chaos. The boys are the keys to Dinotopia's survival, but in order to save their new home, they must journey to the World Beneath, a dangerous territory forbidden to all the continent's inhabitants Wentworth further explains that when both brothers initially arrive on the island "Karl is stubborn and has got a chip on his shoulder, and David is very much scared of his own shadow. And through the course of their adventures and experiences on the island, they both become strong, more confident individuals. And that appeals to me as an actor." Wentworth, who plays the part of David in "Dinotopia," was originally up for the part of Karl. "They had been looking for the two brothers for about two months. And I came in and I read for the role of Karl, and they said 'we love you, we're going to call you back this afternoon.' So I went back that afternoon and it was a mix and match kind of scenario, where they had four David's and four Karl's. And they were kind of putting them together to see who had the right kind of chemistry. So I was reading Karl for most of the afternoon. And then the director, Marco (Brambilla), said, 'you know what, why don't you try David on for size.' So I went out into the hallway and looked over the part of David for literally five minutes or less, came back, and read it with Tyron (Leitso). And two days later, we both got the parts."

Wentworth found much of the same challenges filming "Dinotopia" that Katie Carr did. "I think first and foremost it was an incredibly technical shoot; there was a lot of blue screen and CGI. Every shot had some sort of technical element that you had to be aware of, while you were working across your performance." But on a personal note, Wentworth adds, "One of the biggest challenges for me was working with the character of Zippo. When we would rehearse the scene, we had another actor dress up in a dinosaur costume and you had to memorize where he was standing in the room so that you could look at the right places at the right time. And then when the cameras actually rolled, that actor would read the lines from behind the camera and you would have to act with nothing (there)." This proved to be both strange and difficult at first, but as the project went on, the actors became more used to this process. The actual stunts were also an aspect of the filming process that Wentworth had to embrace. "We also did, I think, 90% of our own stunts. It was a great learning experience but it was also exhausting!" he laughs, recalling all the running, swimming, fighting, falling, and the like that they all went through.

For his part, Wentworth's character, David, becomes a member of the Skybax Corp. Wentworth relates how some of the filming went when David had to learn the skills to fly on the back of a Pterosaur, as a Skybax rider, by training on a crude simulator: "That involved riding a mock Skybax for about two weeks. It's a mechanical device, 9 foot long, hard piece of leather, maybe 4-5 foot width. And you lie down on it, belly down, and the thing lifts up into the air, maybe 8 or 9 feet, and then rolls back and forth, side to side. And my character, of course, is not good at it. And I had to fall off the thing, maybe, two dozen times. I did all of those falls. Which I felt very proud of and a little bruised!" Wentworth goes on to describe his character as being both passive and aggressive due to his innate fear of the situation he and his brother find themselves in. Though both brothers are good people, they are very diametrically different. Karl is often subject to David's goading and sharp tongue. David is also "envious of his brother and his relationship with their father because Karl is the favourite son. But through the course of the movie, David finds strength, being confident in himself and his abilities and kind of gets in touch with his 'inner warrior.'"

The experience of working on "Dinotopia" was an incredible one for Wentworth. He forged a very strong friendship with his co-star Tyron Leitso. Together they were the only American/Canadian people on the set. So they had a lot in common and became close friends. Katie Carr was a joy to work with, and very much like her character on screen in his opinion. And working with such veteran actors as David Thewlis, Alice Krige, Stuart Wilson, Jim Carter, and others was something only a few young actors could only hope to do in their lifetimes.

The Cast was in for a mood awakening-especially Purcell, fresh from Fox's campy Hawaii-set prime-time soap, North Shore. "No waves in Joliet," He notes. "A lot of waves of depression." Miller found the stark setting perfectly evocative, if not downright captivating. "It can get to you after a while," He admits, "I suppose if I were a method actor, I'd have camped out here for a night or two- but to be honest, you just need five minutes and you've got the gist." Which is what? "You want to be anywhere but here." Preview audiences however were more than happy to visit: Prison Break was the highest testing pilot in Fox history.

New Fox Entertainment president Peter Liguori--who made Prison Break the first pickup for his 2005-2006 slate was enamored enought to overlook the fact that the series eventual direction remained uncharted. "Down the road I could be accused of naivete or outright stupidity, but right now I'm enjoying the fact we don't know," says Liguori, noting that 24's producers had no endgame when their show launched. "This is a challenging concept that doesn't conform to the overly tried-and-true recipe." It certainly contains the ingredients for a tantalizing start. In the first batch of episodes, Michael struggles to assemble his escape plan.      Can he outmaneuver a corrupt prison guard? Can he trust a cellmate who pines for his fiancee on the outside? Can he fake a serious ailment to gain access to the infirmary run by a fetching doctor? Can he...Survive? "I've been threatened, shoved, punched, beaten with batteries shoved in a sock, thrown off a balcony, sexually harassed-- and this is episode 1." says Miller. Meanwhile, Lincoln's ex-girlfriend Veronica stumbles into the far-reaching frame-up, which could make watergate look like stealing from the penny dish a 7-Eleven.  "The audience and Veronica have a lot in common, because they're uncovering who's involved in the conspiracy at the same time," Says Tunney "And it's heavy." Intricate, too. The cast--Which also features Stacy Keach as the warden--will expand and contract as the saga unravels. "There are 34 speaking parts in the pilot, and we're introducing new characters all the time," says Scheuring.

  "People that played a tiny role at the beginning of the first season might suddenly be the biggest character in the thing at the end of season 2." Which leads us back to that nagging second-season question. Here's all Scheuring will share of his two-year blueprint: "A lot of people are going to get out. We're going to have 10 or 12 story lines outside the walls--people going to the four corners of the country. One guy for truth, one guy for exoneration, one guy for revenge....It's going to be epic in scope." Death Row Boy already has one journey mapped out. "Maybe Lincoln and Michael go to Hawaii for a year and drink a lot of Corona," says Purcell. "That would be the dream, wouldn't it?" Here's to the guys planting their toes in the sand--At least whichever ones they have left.