I did a Moonlighting episode because I was friends with Whoopi [Goldberg, who guest-starred in the same episode], and she asked me to do it and I did it. But yeah, that was my first regular on a series, and it's because I'd met Brooke Shields a number of years earlier at a charity event.

If you read a script enough, especially a good script - I try to read it 40 to 50 times before you begin so you get a sense of the arc: what happens before, what happens after, what happens during.

We tried the first evening to go down Division Street and Rush Street, but we couldn't get in anywhere because they didn't like [ Emilio Estevez] sneakers and they didn't like my boots. This was 1983 or '84, so it was ridiculous. We ended up at a jazz club, where you go downstairs and there's a very cool place.

John Hurt was incredible to work with.

Adam Sandler is a really funny guy in real life. Separate from all of the movies, that is a funny man.

It's more like the inner workings of John Bender. He feels like he's been given a short shrift, he's not been provided the opportunities that maybe these other kids have. So he feels like he begins in a hole. And instead of trying to raise himself up, he wants to bring all of them down. That's a dynamic that's pretty universal. And so that was the real foothold on that. It wasn't like, "Oh, my high school experience is like John Bender's [in St. Elmo's Fire]."

Part of the reason I thought that I might do a series is, my dad has pretty much been on the same road to work for years and years. And it's like, "Could I do something like that? Am I so independent that I can't punch the clock at the same place?" So part of it was a kind of exercise. "Can I be responsible in this way?" And lo and behold, I could. Luckily. It'd be bad if I couldn't.