Top 70 Eric McCormack Quotes

I love playing anyone that does stuff that I don’t do.

Each one of us fulfills a piece of a larger puzzle.

I’ve had to take roles that on purpose were not Will-like so that someone like ‘The Hollywood Reporter’ would write, ‘McCormack shows great range; no Will Truman here.’

You’re damned in success a little bit.

I find that with every script I get, I go, ‘Who knew this? This is so cool!’

Mental illness is the last frontier. The gay thing is part of everyday life now on a show like ‘Modern Family,’ but mental illness is still full of stigma. Maybe it is time for that to change.

Putting my head on Ruth Buzzi’s body – it’s upsetting.

As I got older, I realized that my life experience, what I really had, was always going to be more valuable than what I pretended to have.

I understudied Colm Feore quite a bit in ’85 and ’86 – ‘Persephone’ and ‘The Boys from Syracuse,’ too – and that was great, great training for me. He was and he is an amazing theatre actor.

Will Truman will be on my epitaph, but as an actor, I have to challenge myself.

I could probably eat sushi every day.

We see people talking to themselves all the time. We always have. Particularly if they’re homeless people or at all questionable, there’s a sense of, ‘That guy’s crazy!’ I see that now with a much more empathetic eye.

My first job was at Baskin-Robbins. I made store manager at 16.

I hope that dog lovers around the world will support the Cruelty Free International global campaign to end the use of dogs in outdated and cruel experiments.

It’s hard in this business to get the opportunities to show off range.

Will isn’t a screaming queen – that’s Jack’s part. They needed someone to play the part for America. It’s just not the same as Britain. To have a gay character as a lead is risky.

I like playing a character every day. I like having something to go back to. I always enjoyed that with ‘Will & Grace.’ I like the camaraderie. I like having a crew that I know and I can work with every day.

That’s the hard part of television: When you walk into the network tests, you’re signing away seven years of your life.

I’m torn about late parenting. I believe people should spend their twenties living and having fun and not having any regrets later. I also think people in their thirties generally make better parents but so many of my friends are having trouble – myself included – as fathers get older.

Monk’s gone, and House is gone. Maybe I can pick up where they left off.

I’m still a kid. I stretched it out.

We want all LGBTQ kids to grow up in a world where they feel safe and equal to their straight peers.

Most people, if you live in a big city, you see some form of schizophrenia every day, and it’s always in the form of someone homeless. ‘Look at that guy – he’s crazy. He looks dangerous.’ Well, he’s on the streets because of mental illness. He probably had a job and a home.

When you become a father, everything changes.

I know where TNT’s sweet spot is, and when I read ‘Perception,’ I thought, ‘This is a chance to play a fascinating, fun, challenging character but still within the realm of something that will sit very well with ‘The Closer’ and ‘Major Crimes’ and the other shows there.’

There was a time when history was written by a few people, the winners. Now, history is written by all of us all the time… That’s the thing we keep telling our 14-year-olds, you know: anything you do right now, it’s not going anywhere.

The States doesn’t think much about Canada, but we’re attached. We’re like Siamese twins. We can’t do things – you can’t roll over in the American bed without waking up the Canadians. It matters.

Show-wise, I love ‘Little Shop’ and ‘Big River’, ‘Avenue Q,’ and ‘Spring Awakening’.

On Netflix and other streaming services, they’re taking risks that are based on ‘Come with us! Come with us!’ and the audience does.

I think most actors go into the business thinking, ‘I can play everything. Why can’t I play a black woman? Just give me a chance.’ Then you grow up and realize it’s probably better that they cast an actual black woman.

‘Perception’ was a different show than ‘Will & Grace’. ‘Will & Grace’ was obviously a different show than anything I’d done before.

In the future, things will truncate! No, in the age of Twitter, we can’t be upset when words become shorter.

I didn’t want to do a lawyer. I didn’t want to do forensics. I didn’t want to work in an ER.

I did a film a couple years ago called ‘Who Is Clark Rockefeller?’ It was a role that I was really proud of that I wish more people could go back and rediscover.

I’m doing a very funny show in which we talk about issues. I speak at Aids charities and things. It’s great to do something fun with our days and yet we’re told we’re doing something important.

I’m an actor. I can’t afford to have a type. I love to mix it up.

That’s an amazing feeling, to walk onstage, and you’re not thinking about anything, you’re not thinking about your lines or what you’re supposed to do – your body, your brain knows, so there’s freedom. There’s not fear, there’s not nerves.

The Trevor Project provides crisis-intervention and suicide-prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning teens and young adults. It’s truly a lifeline to so many young people who just need someone to listen to them.

I haven’t had a chance to play a quiet leading man in a while.

Certainly ‘Lonesome Dove’ would be way hard now, because, I mean, back then I wasn’t married. I didn’t have kids.

The vote is the important thing. Just go and vote.

I knew I wanted to be an actor in first grade.

I did ‘The Commish’ and an episode of ‘Neon Rider,’ and then I got the series called ‘Street Justice,’ which I ended up doing about 18 episodes of.

This ‘historical record’ will exist, flawed as it is, in hundreds of years. What will that tell the future? How accurate are we reporting our lives?

Not a big sci-fi guy.

It’s very, very hard to create something that is big these days because you have niche markets – and, you don’t necessarily need to be big; the show is specifically created for a small group of people. You know, if it’s on the USA network, well, then a small group of people is fine.

I did my first musical in 4th grade as Huck Finn. By 11th grade, I was starring in ‘Godspell’ and ‘Pippin’ and pretending to be Che in ‘Evita’ in my bedroom. Singing has always been a huge part of me.

If you’re doing an hour-long show, you’re working movie hours, doing a 12-15-hour day. We work three or four hours a day, and get every third or fourth week off to give the writers time to write. It’s the cushiest job in Hollywood.

I think there’s a certain objectivity that comes from being Canadian. You’re partly British and partly American; you have a good bird’s-eye view of both countries. So much of the comedy that comes out of Canada is impersonation – it’s less ‘look at me’ than it is ‘look at me playing other people.’

I love learning language and ideas that I didn’t know before and making them sound like my own.

I think we all realize that anyone can – and has – gotten AIDS. So there’s obviously still a lot to be done.

Shelter dogs should be adopted into loving homes, not used in cruel experiments. That’s why I support the Cruelty Free International global dog campaign.

There wasn’t an episode of ‘Will & Grace’ that didn’t begin with my voice saying, ‘Will & Grace’ is taped before a live studio audience.

When I read the script for Will & Grace in 1998, I knew I was the only guy for the part.

It’s a different world now. Guest-starring on a TV show is not some indication that things aren’t going right anymore.

I had played many gay characters before, but they were finite – guest characters in TV shows or characters in plays.

At home in L.A., Sunday is lazy. It’s the wife and me lying in bed with coffee, watching ‘The Soup’ or something funny on TiVo. The kid will occasionally join us. Eventually, breakfast is at a place down the street called Paty’s. And we always have some kind of great dinner – my wife makes a great roast beef.

I’m not sure sometimes if it was because Will was gay or it was a sitcom. But that combination does make it hard to become the new lead on the ‘Sopranos.’

I always get a little uppity when I hear the phrase ‘TV actor.’ It’s like saying you’re a magazine reporter. I was in the theater for ten years before I ever had a TV audition.

I loved working with Cary Elwes, who is in ‘The Princess Bride’, one of my favorite films. He’s a great guy.

My wife is a real camper; it’s a nice way to bond.

When I was 16, I’d ping pong between AC/DC and Barry Manilow without any sense of irony.

I love everybody at TNT, and they were totally behind ‘Trust Me.’ I totally loved that show. I feel like it should have had more life.

We’re definitely hoping ‘Travelers’ attracts more than just solely the sci-fi audience, too. There are so many elements here. I think this will be a show that women like, because there’s a lot of unlikely romance in it between people who were in love 300 years from now, but they’re in different bodies.