Eric McCormack

I\'d done a pilot [of Townies] with Caroline Rhea [Pride & Joy] that didn\'t go anywhere.

The Andromeda strain is a killer disease that they\'ve got to prevent from spreading to being 100 percent contagious. It\'s another one where we\'re racing to save humanity.

[Jack Nash from The Andromeda Strain] was not in the original film, but he was kind of a Geraldo Rivera almost kind of reporter that had a drug addiction. We start the story in rehab, and then he gets the roots of the story. I loved him.

They [the Travelers] know everything about the year that they\'re coming into. But you can know everything and still be tripped up by the little stuff that you didn\'t notice. And one character\'s Facebook page is made up of lies. It\'s an interesting comment on what\'s been going on the last few months. We cannot rely anymore on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. People are making up their own truths.

I really liked it [The Andromeda Strain], and I don\'t know that it ever had the effect they were hoping for. I don\'t know if they got the audience we were hoping for. But I thought it was very fun, and I loved the character [Jack Nash] I was playing.

I think they [TV productions] were just kind of drying up. I\'d done a couple of episodes, but nothing was happening. So I went to Vancouver to visit a buddy and see what was going on, and that year was crazy. Vancouver was on fire at that point. It was all these Stephen J. Cannell productions - The Commish being one of them - and in one I was a bartender, and I think I had five lines.

There was not an episode [on Perception] that didn\'t deal with some form of mental illness, either my own, or I would be the first to notice if a defendant did a certain thing that perhaps he was suffering from this. And so we got to do some really outspoken stuff for what was otherwise a crime-solving show. And it was just a really good team.

I was going to be the hero of the movie [The Lost World]. I had to speak up and be like, \"Shouldn\'t I be the one doing that?

You make a lot of mistakes. I haven\'t seen that movie [The Lost World] in 20 years. But if I saw it, I\'m sure I could pick out a whole lot of mistakes.

So this [\"Grant MacLaren\"] was a chance to sort of go back and do a more leading man. But instead of just solving crimes like a CSI show, this leading man is, like the other travelers, not who he appears.

The things had been made a half a dozen times from silent pictures through the \'30s and \'40s. In fact, I think there\'s a version in the \'50s. And then, of course, Spielberg eventually did a version of The Lost World, but this [filming] was \'91, I think. And we shot it in Zimbabwe.

Rachael Leigh Cook was my leading lady. She was awesome. We loved the show [Perception ]. Again, it was more of a TNT show, because there were crimes that got solved, which [going] back five years ago, was a mandate. But there was something innovative about the mental illness side of it.

[Townies] was a huge cast. It was a bit ungainly, I think with 12 regular characters they had to keep writing for.

I\'d never been to Africa. This really was my first film [The Lost World]. I\'d done 10 years of stage. I\'d done a little bit of television. But this was my first film.

[Jack Nash] was very different than anything I\'d played. In fact, there\'s a scene I have in a tent with Louis Ferreira, who just did an episode of Travelers. He was in the fourth episode of Travelers playing another team leader, and we really have it out, not unlike the way we did in the tent in Andromeda.

I was working with David Warner and John Rhys-Davies, who is from the Indiana Jones movies.He\'s a very strong, strong presence, and so I had to assert myself.

They\'re such different things [Townies and Lonesome Dove]. I certainly love them both. Certainly Lonesome Dove would be way hard now, because, I mean, back then I wasn\'t married.

I\'m never one to compare shows to shows.

Brad Wright, who created Grant MacLaren, had me in mind. We\'d actually worked together 20 years ago. He wrote an episode of The Outer Limits that I was in in \'96 or \'95? So we\'d been aware of each other for years. I\'d lived in Vancouver off and on, where he\'s based. And it just came to me, and I\'m always looking for something different. Perception was a different show than Will & Grace.

I made Lost World in September of \'91, and by the end of that year, I was living in Toronto.

I had a couple of decent laughs on Townies, but for the most part, delivering a joke that you just know is not funny is hard.

I had run into Kari Lizer at an airport, I think, and she said, \"Would you come on the show [ The New Adventures Of Old Christine]?\" And I said, \"God. Absolutely.\"

[The Lost world] was a learning experience. I remember we were shooting a scene in which I dive out of a boat into a river to save the kid that\'s in the movie. And there\'s no mention of a stuntman, and I was like, \"No, I\'ll go in.\" Nobody questioned. I never asked if maybe there was malaria in the water. And I was wearing these tall boots.

When we started the show [Lonesome Dove], Suzanne De Passe - who had done the original miniseries and still owned the property and was turning it into this series - she brought in a lot of old friends - Diahann Carroll and Billy Dee Williams and Dennis Weaver. And we had an interesting collection off the top of these old seasoned actors. Billy Dee was lovely and iconic.

I did five episodes of Townies as Jenna Elfman\'s boyfriend. I was a guest star, but it was the first time I really got to play laughs in front of a sitcom audience.

Andy Ackerman directed the episodes that I was doing, and he directed a lot of Seinfeld [episodes]. And that was great.

[Townies] was a great springboard, obviously, because Jenna [Elfman] went from that to Dharma & Greg, and a few years later, Lauren [Graham] went to Gilmore Girls.

I think because the show [\"Grant MacLaren\"] is essentially a hopeful show. The show says that as bleak as the future is, the one thing that mankind developed was the ability to send their consciousness back and where a lot of the institutions of modern life have fallen apart.

[Trust Me] was TNT, and they were really supportive of the show, but in the end they just didn\'t feel it was their audience. I never really understood why we didn\'t get a longer run at it, because it was Griffin Dunne and Monica Potter. Just a really strong cast.

I jump out of the boat [in The Lost World], and I\'m trying to swim to the kid, and my boots fill with water, and I start to drown, and the director has no idea why I\'m flailing around. He\'s, \"Come on, come on!\" And I managed to rescue myself. I\'m wet and sitting on the banks of the river, and John walks over to me and says, \"Are you all right, dear boy?\" \"Yeah, I\'m all right.\"