Quotes

I feel like every character that I play is a version of myself. I put the clothes on, the shirt and the bell-bottoms and the big belt, and I have my hair all out and the beard -- and I just become. I start playing make believe, and it's something that I've done since I was a little boy. It comes quite naturally.

When I was 12 years old I did a play for high school, even though I wasn't in high school yet, and I really liked that. Up to that point I was into drawing and I thought I was going to be an artist. Then I just liked acting a little too much, so I started doing a lot of plays in and around the Boston Area. When I graduated high school I moved to New York City, got an agent and started to pursue it full time.

[on child acting] By the time I did Doogie Howser, M.D. (1989), I had been acting for 10 years. I already knew I wanted to be an artist and emulate Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jon Voight... I wanted to be a serious actor. I started very young, I started acting around 12 years old doing plays. My background is the theater, and I studied acting seriously. Throughout my career I've gone back to study. So when I got Doogie, I was not a child. I was already college-age, out-of-college-age. When you see child actors who don't go on to have careers, it's because they weren't actors. They were kids who were cute and had a charisma about them, but they didn't really want to do the work. The show ended, and they wanted to go back to their lives, because they weren't really actors. Neil Patrick Harris and I were actors to begin with.

I think there's way too many superheroes movies. I don't like to be watching a show, say about hospitals, and people who do open heart surgery look like fashion models. I don't like that kind of artifice. Which is there not by accident. It's there because people must like looking at pretty people and not thinking about anything. When I go to the emergency room, nobody looks like that. Nobody talks that way. That stuff really bugs me. When a show really gets it right, that's special.

[explaining his process of getting into a character] You come in prepared and with a point of view, but mostly with an openness to play with your partners. You don't come in with a preconceived set plan. The worst thing that you can do is to have a plan and try to stick to it, cause other people will come and all of a sudden -- they've messed up your plan. When you're home alone and you're preparing for the scene, you have to be completely open to the unknown of what your friends are going to be doing when you get there, and that's what's fun.