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When I first started out, I kinda just wanted to do comedy stuff, and thankfully, I had a fair amount of success. I've been able to be on, I think, almost virtually every American sitcom.

When I started 'This American Life', one of the reactions I got was, 'When is the adult going to show up who will host the show?' At some point, people just got used to it.

I think the name of the show, 'This American Life' - we named it that just because it seemed like it made the thing feel big. But we don't think about whether it's an American story or not. We happen to be Americans. I think for the stories to work, they have to be universal.

One of the things I've been most excited by is U.S. television drama. For my money, it's some of the greatest narrative art of our time. Each series is like a 19th-century Russian novel: you need to do a lot of work in the first few episodes, just as you do in the first 50-60 pages of those books.

I never once dreamed of sort of being able to be in an American TV series, you know? It was all about theater and touring and sort of being an actor around Scottish theater.

It's a dream for everyone to be a part of an American series - a huge, successful series. It's just a gift for me.

I don't think I would be getting any of these movies without that show, and that's a strong show, a great fan base and it's helped me out a lot. It took me out of Canada and brought me down to the states and gave me my career basically.

I was dreading all of the ghost stories of working on American television, not in the least, the length. In Britain, a series is six episodes of an hour drama, maybe sometimes eight, but never twenty-two, so I was petrified of that.

I grew up watching 'Magnum, P.I.' and shows like that, where you could develop a character over eight seasons, with stories along the way.