The funny thing about The West Wing is - and I don't know what Aaron Sorkin says about it - but I'm convinced it was a comedy. It's a very intellectual and cerebral comedy, but it was SportsNight in the White House. It had an energy and a vitality and an intelligence and a passion that's rare. And it was extremely difficult to do, because they were so demanding about the dialogue.

And it soon became obvious to me that I had to process and keep my relationship with my ex-wife separate from that of my children. They didn't need or want too much personal information about our relationship. Change is good, and ultimately, creating a new path at this point in my life is energizing, creative, and rejuvenating.

I'd been working on more traditional movie sets and TV shows at Universal. All of a sudden, here we're on location in Animal House, and it's down and dirty and quick. It was the way the new commercial world was shooting; the way the indie world was shooting. These were lighter, faster cameras. It was a generational change.

I always wanted to be an actor. I was one of those lucky kids - or cursed kids - who always knew what he wanted to do. My wife too. She's a ballet dancer, and she's known what she wanted to do since she was 5. My mother used to tell this story about how our TV set had been taken to be repaired, and back then, they took the set out of the console. So there was this empty console with an empty TV screen in it, and I would climb inside and be like, "I'm on TV!"

John Belushi infused Animal House with this spirit of guerilla filmmaking. John Landis came from that world too, and all the National Lampoon writers were from that world. It was just chaos on film. Controlled chaos, though. We stayed very close to the script. It was a very formal kind of movie, if you look at it. Formally photographed and structured, with certain elements of improv.

Meeting Jerry Mathers I remember thinking, "This is it, man. This is the Hollywood life! I'm an actor and I'm going to Jerry's party. This is how it begins!" I was 13 or 14, and I thought this was the beginning of something.

The great thing about theater is the doing it again and again and again.