I grew up in the theatre. It's where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection.
I've loved every minute I've spent in television. And I've had much more failure, as traditionally measured, than success in television. I've done four shows, and only one of them was the 'West Wing.'
If I am writing a movie and I am stuck, I can call the studio and tell them it's delayed. You can't do that with television - you have air dates to meet.
I find television, and particularly live television, very romantic: the idea that there is this small group of people, way up high, in a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan, beaming this signal out into the night.
I get nervous before openings or premieres or when someone's reading a new script, and I get nervous when my daughter isn't in my immediate field of vision.
A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing - when words won't do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern.
I want to work with great directors. I've picked films based on the script or the character and seen them collapse because the directors were not strong visionaries.
It used to be that you kind of got pigeonholed into one thing - you're either a stage actor or a TV actor or a movie actor. Today, there's a lot of crossover with film actors doing television, which never happened before, so those lines are a little bit more blurred than they used to be.
It's every actor's dream to work in a hit show on Broadway and also shoot a television show.
I watch a lot of television. I always have.
