For me as an actor because I've been at it so long, it becomes much harder to watch movies because you really see the seams of everything.

I needed to put something together that would continually get me up at 4:30 in the morning, get me to work and get me excited to throw on those costumes - which clearly continue to excite me, if you are a viewer of the show - and circumstances that continue to surprise me and ask me to go places acting-wise that I haven't explored before.

My role models were always the Pacinos and the Oldmans, the guys who get dirty with their characters, and I arrived in L.A. during the big boom of 'Dawson's Creek.' I was getting cast as the boy next door, or the friend of the jock. I thought, 'Did I really have to do all that studying?'

For me as an actor because I've been at it so long, it becomes much harder to watch movies because you really see the seams of everything.

I never wanted to get caught in doing something that was really one note.

Like I said, when all of that goes away and you just completely lose yourself in the fantasy of it, then that's usually when I walk out of the theatre or turn off the television and just go: "That was brilliant!"

The craft of putting together a performance on film or television is incredibly intricate; you're putting together a story that is completely out of order, that you have to make some sense of, that you have to keep some coherence to the story, to the character.