To know how convincing he is as serial killer Joe Carroll on Fox’s The Following, all James Purefoy has to do is walk down the street. “I got out of a car the other day, and I was talking to somebody, and as I turned, I bumped into this middle-aged lady, and she made the sound of a small dog being kicked. She didn’t scream, she yelped at me,” he says. “It turned out that she’d been watching the show the night before and thinking about it, and then suddenly, poof, there I was.”

Even better: “There was a guy the other day who was asking me where the nearest Starbucks was, and I happened to know it was on the other side of the street. I was pointing it out to him, and suddenly I saw the recognition. [In thick New York accent] ‘Whoa, I am so not messing with you. Get the heck away from me now.’ And he literally ran down the street away from me,” Purefoy says. “That’s a funny thing to feel, isn’t it? On one hand, it means the show’s working and the character’s working, because if he’s not scary, then what’s the point? But on the other hand, as an actor and as a man, I don’t want people to be frightened of me. I want people to be happy to be in my company.”

We’ve got good news: His answers to our EW Pop Culture Personality Test below definitely do the trick… READ FULL STORY »