I mean everyone, from Al Pacino to Murphy Guyer, are phenomenal actors.

Playing a TV character for seven years is almost like when you do a play. You live, breathe, and everything else with that character 24-7 for six months or four months or whatever, and that gets very deep in your blood. When you do a TV character for seven years, that's a long time. It becomes a seminal era in your life.

I didn't expect NBC would be at all thrilled about me, because the year before the West Wing I had rejected a pilot at the last minute and got them very upset. I ended up not coming to the casting - in fact it happened four different times because I just wasn't convinced that I wanted to do television.

It was tough doing 'Underneath the Lintel' in New Jersey in the wintertime, but rewarding. Those audiences were lively and interactive. On-stage was great, but off-stage was difficult.

I had been used to improvising and even in the audition I was feeling free to rearrange Aaron Sorkin words a little bit, as lovely as they were. I didn't find out until after I got the part how furious Aaron was at me for doing that. They said, "He was livid. He did everything in his power not to jump down your throat!" But I came to realise that Aaron was writing in metre and the rhythm of the language is very important.

Things happen to us and reaction is sometimes tough to measure.

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.