‘Will & Grace’s Eric McCormack discusses the sitcom’s legacy

As one half of Will & Grace, Eric McCormack was the face of the modern gay man on television from 1998 to 2006, but now he’s settled into an altogether different role on Perception, in which he plays a schizophrenic neuropsychiatrist.

I recently caught up with Eric to discuss Will & Grace’s legacy, Perception’s upcoming third season, and whether people still think he’s gay all these years later…

This is the first character since Will that you’ve played for several seasons – is it nice to sink your teeth into a persona again?
“Yeah, it’s a little bit like a marriage, you know? In America particularly, when you sign up for a series you will be expected to play them for years, so you want to be careful with who you are signing up with – you can’t know sometimes from a single pilot script. With Will & Grace I knew it was funny but I didn’t know if I could be this guy for whatever it takes, seven, eight, nine years.  With Daniel Pierce in Perception, I thought ‘I’m not sure how they are gonna keep writing this for seasons and seasons but I know that I would love to be this guy because he is so complicated’. And though he would be solving crimes every week I knew I was going to love being in his skin. You can never just relax; the anxiety is good for me.”

Is this the kind of show you like to watch; part detective, part thriller?
“Yeah I do. What I never liked was when there was a similarity in all the detective shows. The character was never first and foremost; it was the crime and the forensics. But there is a throwback to shows such as Sherlock Holmes and Poirot where the detectives had a personality, and flaws. Watching them is as much fun as watching the crime unfold.”

Did you have to do some background research on schizophrenia to play this character?
“Yeah I did loads! I couldn’t take my time with it. I couldn’t [wait to] get it right by episode six. You look at a lot of television and the pilot’s not quite there and in the second episode they are finding it but I couldn’t afford that, not with the mental illness or with the neuroscience. I had to be authentic from moment one. So a lot of my work was done upfront. I met up with a number of people in California, I met with a neuroscience teacher and the head of neuroscience at the University of British Colombia but the most influential one was with a woman named Ellen Sachs who is a professor of Law at USC California but she’s also a diagnosed schizophrenic and has lived with it for over 40 years. The specifics of her journey lent a lot to my choices of how symptoms manifest themselves.”

Obviously Will & Grace left a huge LGBT legacy. Recently, the Vice President of the United States Joe Biden said: “I think Will & Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.” How does that feel?
“It came at a time when the gay marriage argument was just about to really hit a high point in the American debate and a lot of us liberals were looking to the President like ‘come on, say something here’ and out of the blue it’s the Vice President who says it – about our show! But he was particularly coming at it in a very strong way for gay marriage. It was something we could never say by ourselves. It took somebody else with a high profile to say that because it was in people’s living rooms and it was funny, something else was getting in there. Similar to mental illness and Perception it was educating people about something they didn’t know about. And if you are in denial or don’t know anybody who is gay, then it’s going to take a character on television to open your mind.

“I have often said that you can have all the angry parades or celebratory parades, you can picket the White House but that’s not what is going to change people’s minds and certainly not their hearts. It is going to be example and for a lot of people they didn’t have an example – or maybe they did, and they had a son they told to get out – but if you can embrace these two characters on television week after week after week, Jack and Will, then you can embrace your son again. And I’ve heard story after story like that – that it created an empathy that wasn’t there before.”

With the finale, you kind of closed the door didn’t you? Is that something you are sad you can’t return to, or are you pleased you wrapped it up so tightly?
“I think it is kind of both. We definitely gave the show the end it deserved and it also took away the temptation to go back to that because I think we would only damage what we did at the end. I always thought that was one of the best things the writers ever did; to create the illusion for one second that you were seeing Will & Grace at 18 meeting each other, until they introduce themselves and you realise that it’s their children. When we had the read through around the table for that, all of us gasped. And the night we shot it, the gasp from the audience followed by us coming on in old-age make up was pretty effective I think.”

How often are you mistaken for being gay yourself?
“Only by my wife – which is embarrassing! Haha! I didn’t put it out there, I certainly didn’t worry about it one way or the other, but the word got out pretty early that I was just a straight married guy and who knows, maybe that was in part what made it OK for America too back then. Nowadays you have Neil Patrick Harris playing a straight guy which is another great stride for America, because it shouldn’t matter on either side of the fence. There was certainly some guys back then that were pissed off that a straight guy was playing a gay guy but I think that went away.”

Can it still make you laugh when you catch it on TV?
“Yeah! I mean probably more so than it did then because I forget! So much was written on the spot. The writers would pitch three new jokes and those were often the jokes that aired, so I’m hearing jokes I have no memory of saying which is great fun. And I think it ages pretty well which is lucky, there is no terrible fashion; a few questionable ones but the show still looks good.”

Perception airs in the UK on Watch, available through satellite and cable.