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If you express yourself too much, you're considered weak.

If you play a part that's been done before, on stage for instance, you feel like you're carrying a torch and staggering under the weight of it for a bit and then passing it on to somebody else.

The thing is, you don't want to overact or be full of yourself.

Often I feel I say too much.

I think I invented the phrase 'Don't overdo it.'

When I'm writing a new play, there's a period where I know I shouldn't be out in public much. I imagine most people who create go through something like this. You willfully loosen some of the inner straps that hold your core together.

That's what all art's about - a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can't in real life. Like a dancer is always trying to fly, really - to do something that's just not possible. But you try to do as much as you can within those physical boundaries.

Why do you always insist on playing while I'm trying to conduct?

The danger with playing a part that defines you is that it swallows up everything else.

It worries me a little bit the reach and power of TV. More people saw me in 'The Practice' than will ever see me in all the stage plays I ever do. Which is sort of humbling. Or troubling. Or both.