Eric McCormack
At home in L.A., Sunday is lazy. It's the wife and me lying in bed with coffee, watching 'The Soup' or something funny on TiVo. The kid will occasionally join us. Eventually, breakfast is at a place down the street called Paty's. And we always have some kind of great dinner - my wife makes a great roast beef.
I think there's a certain objectivity that comes from being Canadian. You're partly British and partly American; you have a good bird's-eye view of both countries. So much of the comedy that comes out of Canada is impersonation - it's less 'look at me' than it is 'look at me playing other people.'
My wife is a real camper; it's a nice way to bond.
When I read the script for Will & Grace in 1998, I knew I was the only guy for the part.
I think I was very lucky that I didn't get well-known until my early thirties. If it had happened when I was younger, you might have seen me falling out of nightclubs. I think I conducted myself as a much better human being because I was already married when all that came along (I got married five months after I got the role as Will).
If you're doing an hour-long show, you're working movie hours, doing a 12-15-hour day. We work three or four hours a day, and get every third or fourth week off to give the writers time to write. It's the cushiest job in Hollywood.
I had played many gay characters before, but they were finite - guest characters in TV shows or characters in plays.
Growing up, my father was a financial analyst for an oil company. He was just a regular dad. And when I would say, 'Hey, come see my play,' he'd say, 'Sure.' He'd see one, 'Oh, good play' - you know, very typical dad reaction.
I was raised on 'Get Smart' and 'All in the Family' and 'M.A.S.H.,' and certainly when 'Cheers' came along, that was a big one.
We didn't, with 'Will & Grace,' set out to change the gay world. We just set out to be funny.
I think we all realize that anyone can - and has - gotten AIDS. So there's obviously still a lot to be done.
I like playing a character every day. I like having something to go back to. I always enjoyed that with 'Will & Grace.' I like the camaraderie. I like having a crew that I know and I can work with every day.
Back when I was in theater school, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, 'Sweeney Todd' was a huge touchstone for me, my favorite musical for sure.
I always get a little uppity when I hear the phrase 'TV actor.' It's like saying you're a magazine reporter. I was in the theater for ten years before I ever had a TV audition.
There wasn't an episode of 'Will & Grace' that didn't begin with my voice saying, 'Will & Grace' is taped before a live studio audience.
Mental illness is the last frontier. The gay thing is part of everyday life now on a show like 'Modern Family,' but mental illness is still full of stigma. Maybe it is time for that to change.
'Perception' was a different show than 'Will & Grace'. 'Will & Grace' was obviously a different show than anything I'd done before.
I did 'The Commish' and an episode of 'Neon Rider,' and then I got the series called 'Street Justice,' which I ended up doing about 18 episodes of.
Certainly 'Lonesome Dove' would be way hard now, because, I mean, back then I wasn't married. I didn't have kids.
As much as I loved Pacino and De Niro and wanted to be a dramatic actor, I also grew up on sitcoms. I grew up on 'M*A*S*H' and 'All In The Family' and 'Cheers.' And then around this time - this would have been '95, '96 - I was so into 'Friends' and 'Mad About You,' the idea of being on a sitcom became a very real thing that I wanted.
Probably one of the most surreal moments of my career was acting in front of Notre Dame with a mime.
I love everybody at TNT, and they were totally behind 'Trust Me.' I totally loved that show. I feel like it should have had more life.
I know where TNT's sweet spot is, and when I read 'Perception,' I thought, 'This is a chance to play a fascinating, fun, challenging character but still within the realm of something that will sit very well with 'The Closer' and 'Major Crimes' and the other shows there.'
I love playing anyone that does stuff that I don't do.
I love learning language and ideas that I didn't know before and making them sound like my own.
That's the hard part of television: When you walk into the network tests, you're signing away seven years of your life.
That was the only trepidation I had about 'Will & Grace.' It had nothing to do with the sexuality of the character. It was more, 'This could be the next 7 to 10 years of my life.'
I think most actors go into the business thinking, 'I can play everything. Why can't I play a black woman? Just give me a chance.' Then you grow up and realize it's probably better that they cast an actual black woman.
As I got older, I realized that my life experience, what I really had, was always going to be more valuable than what I pretended to have.
The vote is the important thing. Just go and vote.
I've had to take roles that on purpose were not Will-like so that someone like 'The Hollywood Reporter' would write, 'McCormack shows great range; no Will Truman here.'
I'm an actor. I can't afford to have a type. I love to mix it up.
I haven't had a chance to play a quiet leading man in a while.
We see people talking to themselves all the time. We always have. Particularly if they're homeless people or at all questionable, there's a sense of, 'That guy's crazy!' I see that now with a much more empathetic eye.
Particularly in television, we can stereotype ourselves. You realize that we all have a lot of voices in our head. We have angry voices, we have voices of doubt, and we have moments of strength.
With these scripts and these writers, so much of it is done for me. Because we don't just throw words around: we make sure the audience understands.
I find that with every script I get, I go, 'Who knew this? This is so cool!'
Not a big sci-fi guy.
We're definitely hoping 'Travelers' attracts more than just solely the sci-fi audience, too. There are so many elements here. I think this will be a show that women like, because there's a lot of unlikely romance in it between people who were in love 300 years from now, but they're in different bodies.
On Netflix and other streaming services, they're taking risks that are based on 'Come with us! Come with us!' and the audience does.
In the future, things will truncate! No, in the age of Twitter, we can't be upset when words become shorter.
Unfortunately, with men's health, we don't talk about it enough, and prostate cancer gets lost in the conversation.
The States doesn't think much about Canada, but we're attached. We're like Siamese twins. We can't do things - you can't roll over in the American bed without waking up the Canadians. It matters.
Every day, there's something that makes you go, 'Is this Funny or Die?' That can't be a real headline.
There was a time when history was written by a few people, the winners. Now, history is written by all of us all the time... That's the thing we keep telling our 14-year-olds, you know: anything you do right now, it's not going anywhere.
This 'historical record' will exist, flawed as it is, in hundreds of years. What will that tell the future? How accurate are we reporting our lives?
I needed to start pulling at this other sort of funnier, lighter side. So I auditioned for everything. I auditioned for 'Friends,' even.
Most people, if you live in a big city, you see some form of schizophrenia every day, and it’s always in the form of someone homeless. “Look at that guy - he’s crazy. He looks dangerous.” Well, he’s on the streets because of mental illness. He probably had a job and a home...Collection: Jobs
I got Michael Caine's book, Acting In Film, and I read it on the plane, desperately trying to glean information from him about how to adapt my craft, which was actually very helpful.Collection: Book