As a television actor, there's a power you're given to use your image to do something valuable. As a parent, these messages are particularly important to me.

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.

[Townies] was a huge cast. It was a bit ungainly, I think with 12 regular characters they had to keep writing for.

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.

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.

I had played many gay characters before, but they were finite - guest characters in TV shows or characters in plays.

As much as I loved [Al] Pacino and [Robert] De Niro and wanted to be a dramatic actor, I also grew up on sitcoms.