My most romantic job: I was a manager at Baskin-Robbins.
I had played many gay characters before, but they were finite - guest characters in TV shows or characters in plays.
Every actor has periods of their life that are a little less busy than others, and that was just a time when I needed that. And to be back on a sitcom stage, with Julia [ Louis-Dreyfus], was really, really fun.
I love playing anyone that does stuff that I don't do. The fun of playing an assassin is that I've never killed anybody. The fun of playing a brilliant musician is that I don't actually play any instruments.
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."
Often, particularly with voices, you're hearing horrible things, demon voices, and voices telling them that they're not worth it or that they're going to kill somebody. In those moments, they're overcoming things.
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.
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.
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'd done a pilot [of Townies] with Caroline Rhea [Pride & Joy] that didn't go anywhere.
I did five episodes of Townies as Jenna Elfman's boyfriend. I was a guest star, but it was the first time I really got to play laughs in front of a sitcom audience.
They're such different things [Townies and Lonesome Dove]. I certainly love them both. Certainly Lonesome Dove would be way hard now, because, I mean, back then I wasn't married.
Back then, all the networks were still making a movie a week, virtually. So I did five of them that year. So it was just a nonstop... '92 was a great, nonstop ride in Vancouver.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember I had scenes with Melinda McGraw in "Ides Of March" that I didn't have in "Video Vigilante," but I can't quite picture that other character. But it was Vancouver, and that year was crazy
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.
I made Lost World in September of '91, and by the end of that year, I was living in Toronto.
I'm never one to compare shows to shows.
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.
So this ["Grant MacLaren"] was a chance to sort of go back and do a more leading man. But instead of just solving crimes like a CSI show, this leading man is, like the other travelers, not who he appears.
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.
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.
