I was happy to spend time with my family, get to know my daughter, who was born during The West Wing. I missed her first words. I missed her first steps. I'd leave work before she woke up and got home after she was asleep and didn't really know her. So it was important for that reason to reintroduce myself to the family after all of that hard work.

I've been very lucky not to have turned down too many roles that I've later regretted.

The political nonsense of network television and the culture of a set and all the problems that that can create, I can take. I can't take betraying the truth of what I'm doing. It cuts to the absolute core of everything that I do in the craft, in this world that I live in.

I would love to be in the position where the role is challenging enough that I need three months to prepare for it and then six months to live the life of character.

There's a genetic memory that stays on your bones. What you experience when you're young, I think it stays with you.

You had actors that came from live theatre and it felt like you're doing a play. Every time we did a three or four minute walk-and-talk in the West Wing, the exhilaration of going on stage would be a part of it.

Most actors, unless they're big movie stars and can carve out huge chunks of time to focus on one movie that takes six months - the rest of us have to jump around to make ends meet.