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In terms of the pilot, you have to introduce a lot of characters in a very short period of time, and you have to paint with slightly broad brush strokes because you just need to give an audience an idea of who these people might be.

The funny thing is that making a pilot is sort of an audition, at least for me. There's something psychological there, where you're sort of asking for the job while you're acting. And then when it's been picked up, it's a completely different psychological dynamic.

You hope for that with anything, but with a TV show, the writer and the actor being the right mix are more important than the actual writing of the pilot because you hope it's something that can have a long life.

A pilot is like the most extensive dress rehearsal you can ever imagine, because the writers are learning about the actors, the actors are learning about the characters.

The pilot is a sales tool; it introduces you to the characters and might set the template for what the show is meant to be, but there's so many boxes you have to check off on a pilot that it can sort of hurt the storytelling in a way.

I don't have my pilot's licence anymore, but I'm still very political.

Pilots are so hard because you have to introduce all these characters, you have to hook an audience, and an audience has such a smaller attention span than maybe they used to have.

I've learned a lot about what kind of actor I want or do not want to be while being on set. I sit back and observe how other actors treat the totem pole of set politics.

For the last four or five years, I had been in the position where I didn't have to take a pilot. I took this one because the script and the people were terrific. It never frightened me. As we were doing the pilot, I could tell that it was working.

You know, it's scary when you sign onto a pilot of a series because, as much as you want the series to go, you also want it to be a character that you'd be interested in playing for a long time.