'Empire's' key players

A Who's Who guide to the quasi-historical world of HBO's "Boardwalk Empire":

ENOCH "NUCKY" THOMPSON

Nucky (Steve Buscemi), a character based on longtime Atlantic City Republican boss Enoch "Nucky" Johnson, is a charming widower with a wandering eye, a jealous mistress and a vision of what the resort town he rules could become with the advent of Prohibition: a place where vacationers willing to pay almost anything for a drink will flock to do just that. What he may not see coming is the transformation of the city's casual corruption into something more sinister and harder to control.

MARGARET SCHROEDER

A feisty and alarmingly well-read Irish immigrant, Margaret (Kelly Macdonald) first catches Nucky's eye when, heavily pregnant, she comes to him for help for her drunken lout of a husband. Though under the erroneous impression that he's anti-liquor – she first spots him at a temperance meeting where he's at his hypocritical politician best – she proves over time to be more practical in her approach to Prohibition (and to Nucky) than he may be with her.

JIMMY DARMODY

A Princeton student who left college to fight in the Great War, Jimmy (Michael Pitt) is anxious to make up for lost time by taking full advantage of whatever Prohibition brings to Atlantic City, but he may be moving too fast for his mentor, Nucky, whose affection for Jimmy is about to be sorely tested.

GILLIAN DARMODY

Jimmy's showgirl mother, Gillian (Gretchen Mol) has a memorable first scene in "Boardwalk Empire," a complicated backstory that involves Nucky and an even more complicated future. And, yes, Mol is far too young to be playing Pitt's mother, there being less than nine years between the two actors.

ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Rothstein, the New York gangster widely believed to have been behind the Chicago "Black Sox" scandal – in which the 1919 World Series was fixed – as a cruelly calculating gambler who prides himself on only betting on sure things. (Yes, some might call this cheating.) Prohibition brings Rothstein into "Boardwalk Empire's" universe, along with other real-life mobsters "Lucky" Luciano (Vincent Piazza) and Chicago's Al Capone (Stephen Graham).

CHALKY WHITE

"The Wire's" Michael Kenneth Williams - yes, Omar! – plays Chalky, a bootlegger who works for Nucky and who, as the unofficial mayor of Atlantic City's black community, is also a key player in Nucky's political empire, which counts on the votes of the waiters and other service-industry people who keep the resort running to help keep Nucky and his cronies in power.

NELSON VAN ALDEN

Michael Shannon plays a senior IRS agent whose zeal for Prohibition enforcement takes on the color of a religious crusade. Though his efforts often seem laughable at best, he and his fellow Prohibition agents are in dead earnest and will prove more trouble for Nucky and his confederates than they'd initially expected.

LUCY DANZIGER

Paz de la Huerta plays Nucky's volatile mistress, a former Ziegfield Follies showgirl who keeps a watchful eye on her meal ticket and is suspicious – with some justification - of every woman Nucky spends time with, including the very pregnant Margaret Schroeder.

- Ellen Gray