You have to pay attention to the work on the page and make it as good as possible because it could be your last.

I tell people, "It's the hardest thing to explain, but it's the easiest thing to understand." And all anybody really needs to know is, the struggles of life, the joy of life, the excitement and the heartbreak of life is something we can all connect to. And I like to hope that the inclusivity of the show [This Is Us] is something that audiences will relate to.

In THE WHISPERS, I played a father, with an amazingly talented actor, Kyle Breitkopf. I've played a dad a lot, so it's nice again to be in that world [in This Is Us].

I think that's something that always enticed me about the '40s - back then, the glamour and the style - you couldn't really make it up. You just were or you weren't. You either fit in that world or you fit in the other. Things were very cut and dry. Things were simple. There wasn't a whole lot of excess or flash to be flashy; it was real flash, and real excitement.

I saw so many kids 22, 19, with holes the size of a dime and they're dead. It's a gunshot and of course those kids thought they were as tough as nails, they never expected to be dead but they're gone. It's kinda nice to walk out of the County Coroner's Office with a couple of sayings, you know? "You're not so tough being dead on a morgue table."

You have to pay attention to the work on the page and make it as good as possible because it could be your last.

It's a great place to be at 36 because you're an adult and you're responsible for how you impact other people, the direction of your own life [too], but you're also young enough to say, "You know what? I'm not sure of where I'm at, and I'm going to change that course and do something different. I'm going to look at life differently." I think that's the magic of that age.