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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, hed say, Sure. Hed see one, Oh, good play - you know, very typical dad reaction.
I have accomplished a lot, but it didn't happen overnight for me. I was 35 when I got the show, and had been working professionally for 15 years. It would be a lot weirder if I were in my early 20s and stumbled into it.
My second year of Ryerson, I still lived at my folks' place. I went to the attic to find some prop for a play I was doing. And I found a scrapbook dedicated to my father's years at Ryerson as an actor. He never mentioned it.
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.
But I was ready for it and I knew I could do it. I've just turned 40, I have a son and I feel more settled and driven than ever. I think my 40s will be my most prolific time. It's a very rare life you get to lead as a sitcom guy.
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.
It was a film [The Lost World], and it's a sequel at the same time. The first shot on the first day was from the sequel to the movie they hadn't made yet. But yeah, it was a pretty amazing experience running around the jungle for that.
I always kind of dreamed locally - I never really ever dream that I would be south of the border; I dreamed about being a theatre star in Toronto, and maybe I'd do Stratford and regional stuff. I always thought it would be a slow growth.
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.
Seinfeld [show] had been so huge for me. It was one of those things where I discovered Seinfeld really early and was making sure everyone I knew was watching it. I would tape it on VHS and show it to people that hadn't seen the show yet.
[Jack Nash from The Andromeda Strain] was not in the original film, but he was kind of a Geraldo Rivera almost kind of reporter that had a drug addiction. We start the story in rehab, and then he gets the roots of the story. I loved him.
That's an amazing feeling, to walk onstage, and you're not thinking about anything, you're not thinking about your lines or what you're supposed to do - your body, your brain knows, so there's freedom. There's not fear, there's not nerves.
That was my big break [Lonesome Dove]. My first real kind of adult role on something really well-written. It was a spin-off of the miniseries, and I played Col. Mosby, a very dangerous, Southern colonel in post-Civil War, wandering the West.
The Trevor Project provides crisis-intervention and suicide-prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning teens and young adults. It's truly a lifeline to so many young people who just need someone to listen to them.
I really liked it [The Andromeda Strain], and I don't know that it ever had the effect they were hoping for. I don't know if they got the audience we were hoping for. But I thought it was very fun, and I loved the character [Jack Nash] I was playing.
[Trust Me] was TNT, and they were really supportive of the show, but in the end they just didn't feel it was their audience. I never really understood why we didn't get a longer run at it, because it was Griffin Dunne and Monica Potter. Just a really strong cast.
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.'
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.
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...
I think because the show ["Grant MacLaren"] is essentially a hopeful show. The show says that as bleak as the future is, the one thing that mankind developed was the ability to send their consciousness back and where a lot of the institutions of modern life have fallen apart.
The things had been made a half a dozen times from silent pictures through the '30s and '40s. In fact, I think there's a version in the '50s. And then, of course, Spielberg eventually did a version of The Lost World, but this [filming] was '91, I think. And we shot it in Zimbabwe.
It's very, very hard to create something that is big these days because you have niche markets - and, you don't necessarily need to be big; the show is specifically created for a small group of people. You know, if it's on the USA network, well, then a small group of people is fine.
I'm torn about late parenting. I believe people should spend their twenties living and having fun and not having any regrets later. I also think people in their thirties generally make better parents but so many of my friends are having trouble - myself included - as fathers get older.
Rachael Leigh Cook was my leading lady. She was awesome. We loved the show [Perception ]. Again, it was more of a TNT show, because there were crimes that got solved, which [going] back five years ago, was a mandate. But there was something innovative about the mental illness side of it.
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.
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.'
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.
It's very strange - several years ago, I was in the running for the 'Young Frankenstein' musical. Kristin Chenoweth was going to do it, but then she backed out because she got 'Pushing Daisies' on TV, and then, the next day, I went in for my final-final audition, and I saw Megan Mullally standing there.
[Jack Nash] was very different than anything I'd played. In fact, there's a scene I have in a tent with Louis Ferreira, who just did an episode of Travelers. He was in the fourth episode of Travelers playing another team leader, and we really have it out, not unlike the way we did in the tent in Andromeda.
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 have a big, long episode [in Full Circle] with Calista [Flockhart], and then my character actually carries out through a lot of it because he was a cop investigating this crime. But it is almost hard to remember, even though it wasn't that long ago. We shot it so fast. We literally shot that whole episode in one day.
I was playing this sort of asshole actor [in The Jenny McCarthy Show]. And we shot the pilot, and it was a guaranteed go. It was going to be 24 [episodes] on the air. No questions from NBC. And we shot the pilot, and I was in Toronto doing a movie, and I got a call saying they cut the character, that I was off the show.
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. It was not so much a relief. It was really exciting. It's an amazing thing to be in front of an audience.
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.
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).
[The Lost world] was a learning experience. I remember we were shooting a scene in which I dive out of a boat into a river to save the kid that's in the movie. And there's no mention of a stuntman, and I was like, "No, I'll go in." Nobody questioned. I never asked if maybe there was malaria in the water. And I was wearing these tall boots.
There was not an episode [on Perception] that didn't deal with some form of mental illness, either my own, or I would be the first to notice if a defendant did a certain thing that perhaps he was suffering from this. And so we got to do some really outspoken stuff for what was otherwise a crime-solving show. And it was just a really good team.
When we started the show [Lonesome Dove], Suzanne De Passe - who had done the original miniseries and still owned the property and was turning it into this series - she brought in a lot of old friends - Diahann Carroll and Billy Dee Williams and Dennis Weaver. And we had an interesting collection off the top of these old seasoned actors. Billy Dee was lovely and iconic.
I jump out of the boat [in The Lost World], and I'm trying to swim to the kid, and my boots fill with water, and I start to drown, and the director has no idea why I'm flailing around. He's, "Come on, come on!" And I managed to rescue myself. I'm wet and sitting on the banks of the river, and John walks over to me and says, "Are you all right, dear boy?" "Yeah, I'm all right."
I think they [TV productions] were just kind of drying up. I'd done a couple of episodes, but nothing was happening. So I went to Vancouver to visit a buddy and see what was going on, and that year was crazy. Vancouver was on fire at that point. It was all these Stephen J. Cannell productions - The Commish being one of them - and in one I was a bartender, and I think I had five lines.
Brad Wright, who created Grant MacLaren, had me in mind. We'd actually worked together 20 years ago. He wrote an episode of The Outer Limits that I was in in '96 or '95? So we'd been aware of each other for years. I'd lived in Vancouver off and on, where he's based. And it just came to me, and I'm always looking for something different. Perception was a different show than Will & Grace.
They [the Travelers] know everything about the year that they're coming into. But you can know everything and still be tripped up by the little stuff that you didn't notice. And one character's Facebook page is made up of lies. It's an interesting comment on what's been going on the last few months. We cannot rely anymore on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. People are making up their own truths.