Before he was a cop, Logan Marshall-Green was a shark.

Not a pool shark or a loan shark, but a real shark -- with fins and teeth. That was the role he played in Adam Bock's quirky little production "Swimming in the Shallows." A few months later, Marshall-Green was Ludwig von Beethoven in "Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead," with a well-regarded stint as Bo Decker of "Bus Stop" sandwiched in between.

"I'd rather be poor and doing theater than rich and not doing it," Marshall-Green said in an interview with "Theater Mania" in 2005. "I need to be on stage. I think it all has to do with responsibility. In theater, the show comes down on the actors' shoulders every night. Actually, the responsibility starts in rehearsal when you're finding, searching, exploring. You don't get that in film or TV."

This background has helped Marshall-Green crawl into his role as rogue LAPD undercover cop Dean Bendis in TNT's "Dark Blue."

"As an actor, the idea of these guys breaking the rules, is something appealing ... "Marshall-Green told MovieWeb. "Actors playing actors who break rules, because that’s how I approach my job, trying to find the rules and trying to find the ways to break them.

"I actually read the script when I was abroad. I was going to go in for it, and just sent a tape in and got a test, they flew me out and I just walked in the room as the character and hopefully walk out with the character, and that’s what happened."

Born Nov. 1, 1976 in Charleston, SC (along with twin brother Taylor), Marshall-Green was raised by his mother, Lowry Marshall, in Cranston, RI. After graduating from the National Theater Instutute in Waterford, CT, he earned a master's in fine arts for the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

"Both my mom and my dad were teachers, directors, actors," Marshall-Green told Theater Mania. "My mom has been teaching theater at Brown University for almost 20 years now, and a lot of my family are teachers. So it was very important for me to get an MFA and seek out as much training as possible, to set up a foundation of learning for the rest of my career."

Asked about his hyphenated last name, he said: "I'm a stickler about it, and not because I'm one of those pretentious actors. My mom brought me up and she wasn't going to have my name be Logan Green, which is my father's name. She wanted her name involved as well. Her name is Lowry Marshall."

Before nailing down a co-starring role in "Dark Blue," Marshall had guest roles on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit", "Law & Order," "The OC" and "24." He received a Drama Desk Award for his work in "The Distance From Here" and was Edmund to Kevin Kline's Lear in a Public Thester production of "King Lear" in 2007.