Quotes

[explaining his once-made-remark that actors are alcoholics waiting to happen] What I meant by that was it's a very tiny percentage of humanity that would entertain the notion of making a spectacle out of themselves, whether on television or even more excruciatingly live onstage. And that indicates to me an incredibly assertive part of that person. The problem is you take these people with this incredibly rare assertive impulse and put them in a business that renders them totally passive. Usually you have to wait for somebody to write the play or to direct the play; you have to get chosen for the play; you have to see if the play does well. There's no resolution to that kind of assertiveness that is the crux of what I think makes a lot of actors very good and the passivity that the business imposes on you.

I'm actually very personally conservative about what my kids are exposed to, and I've raised them like any parent where you're fighting the inevitable premature loss of their innocence because of a lot of crap that gets made. It is, by the way, upsetting to me that we live in a culture where the definition of obscenity is the act of procreation.

[on if he's felt typecast after "The West Wing"] You're going to get typecast as whatever you do, but to be typecast as that guy who was complicated, passionate, funny, that's fine. But yeah, people think you're going to be a smart guy in a suit. But my God, what a wonderful experience. The only problem with it is it does spoil you; honestly, not to be pretentious but the creative experience, that kind of writing and those kinds of actors and directors and that arena, for God's sake. What do you do after that? A show about a canning factory?

[on whether he thinks there is a difference between actors who do theater and film versus those who just do film] I think with certain kinds of material it's just a huge advantage. I myself cannot imagine what it would be like to be an actor who hadn't done theater simply because when you're an actor you're a pawn in storytelling, and if you're onstage you're telling a story over and over, you're telling the entire story eight times a week. If you're in a movie or TV show, you're telling it once out of sequence in snippets. You just get to act more [in theater]. I think it's the reason we had such a great group in "The West Wing." The reason was they were all theater actors.