ERIC McCORMACK | Straight talking with Wil Truman

Now he’s got two hit shows, which is pretty well unheard of.

Will & Grace ran for eight top-rating seasons, won scores of awards, and 11 years after it ended was brought back for at least three seasons. Still going strong. About the time it was revived Eric was launching into a new show of his own, Travelers [apologies for the oficial US speling]. Cheese and chalk. Either could have skittled the other, being from different studios. Eric says it was a miracle both got off the ground. He’s talking to us as Travelers series 1 goes to DVD and Blu-ray on Via Vision. Will & Grace is now on Stan.

One minute you're a light-hearted bloke on a quest for an uncluttered life and attracted to men. Next minute you're a dramatic hero on a quest to save America and attracted to women. What a double life!

Yeah. I got my start in Shakespeare doing rep theatre, so the idea of doing a comedy in the afternoon and a drama at night is just part of my bones but it so rarely happens, certainly in American television, that's for sure.

Travelers is about as far away from Will & Grace as you can possibly get – was that part of the appeal?

Absolutely. I mean for me when I started Travelers there was no idea that Will & Grace would ever come back. I was already shooting Travelers when I got a call from Max Mutchnick [creator-writer] saying he wanted to do the political video for Hillary, a Will & Grace reunion that led to the revival of the show. I have tried very hard in the years since the first Will & Grace series to get back to my dramatic roots and I've done that in a few series but Travelers is perfect timing for me and if that's all I was doing I'd be perfectly happy. The idea that Will & Grace came back during it and that both networks got along is like eating dinner and dessert at the same time!

Did you ever get any direct White House feedback for that Hillary episode?

We got letters from Hillary thanking us for the video we did but in terms of the White House episode that began the series, no, as we have been completely ignored by the, er, current administration.

Travelers is not an easy premise to explain at the start of the show. It's complex, sophisticated. What was it about the show that appealed to you?

What I love most is it's more like an espionage show than sci-fi. These characters have a very sci-fi job to do, to change elements of the past but as they await assignments they have to do their Protocol 5, as they call it. They have to live the lives of the people whose bodies they’ve taken over. That's what makes the show different and what makes it deeper. The individual lives of the travelers in their host bodies become very emotional and can be very funny and they're also top-secret. On the show we're all living these double lives that we can’t share with our new loved ones. For instance, seeing Kat, my wife, through the eyes of a new guy is now starting to backfire, she knows by the end of season two, she knows something's up. So it's that idea of having to constantly maintain a facade but at the same time we’re watching people appreciate these people came from a world where there's virtually no food, no animals and to see them appreciate the things that are right about the 21st century is really cool, too. 

The press is constantly berated for twisting the truth, even the President maligns us. But when you look at the greatest archive of reporting these days, social media . . . 

Yeah!

. . . I don't think people can point the finger at the press for disseminating fake news!

Oh, no, exactly – as we did with Marcy on Travelers. The very idea of what we’re now writing on our Facebook pages will someday be taken as some sort of fact is to suggest that there are no facts any more and as soon as people start debating "facts" and making up their own lives and writing it down as if it were for the record who knows how we’ll look back on this time in terms of what really actually happened and what was just made-up bullshit.

It’s something you've no doubt heard many times, but it bears repeating: it’s just huge that you were and are extremely happy as a straight man to play a gay man without apology. No easy thing in this industry. 

Well, you know, I certainly played a number of gay men prior to Will. I wasn’t shy. There's never been an apology because it never seemed strange to me. I come from the theatre, I probably know more gay men than straight men and I loved the idea. At the time there may have been people who thought, oh, that's just the easy way out for the network, if they hire a straight guy maybe that's more palatable for America. But I feel in some ways it's the opposite now. I get to be an ambassador for something and it's been a real privilege for 20 years, so rather than apologise, I boast about it. It's a great opportunity to get to show the world something that they really hadn't seen a lot of in America prior to this show.

We're so proud to have you as an honorary member of the club, mate. 

Well, thanks, that's the best part. That when we started there was fear that even before America accepted the show or didn't accept the show that it would be the gay community that would go, yeah? No, we don't buy the show and we don't buy him in the role. But it was the opposite. It was GLAD [Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders] and those organisations that got behind us right from the beginning that were happy we were there, that appreciated having a Will Truman. I've gotten to know the minister for veteran affairs in Canada, Seamus O'Regan. He used to be a morning talkshow host and now he's very much part of Trudeau's government. I spoke to him recently and he said thanks from all the Will Trumans in the world. We weren't represented. There were lots of crazy queens and gay next-door neighbours and Paul Lynde but there weren't . . . us . . . just those guys who go to work and wear suits and marry other guys who wear suits; we were an unrepresented silent majority in the gay community and it's nice to see that guy up there. So that meant a lot to me.

The show filled a vacuum and become a massive piece of television history – still in production. Ever felt straitjacketed?

No pun intended?! [Laughs] You know, yeah, when I finished the show I became aware that there was a certain perception that –and it wasn't just the gay side, it was also the sitcom side of it, that that's all people had seen of me for eight years and so it was up to me to walk into rooms and not be that. But it was hard because there was such joy in it and still is in being Will. It comes very naturally and it's a big piece of my own energy when I tell the story or whatever, so in order to find my way to Travelers and my character Grant McLaren I did have to kind of sit on that a little bit, and convince people  there are other things I can do. But it was never with a sense of animosity. I never thought oh, now I'm stuck as Will Truman. It's just something I have such gratitude about and always will and the look on people's faces. I remember my first job ever was at Baskin-Robbins, the ice-cream store, and I remember the manager saying you're gonna love this job because no one is ever unhappy in an ice-cream store. And I thought that's kind of what it's like to be Will Truman. Nobody walks up to me and talks to me who’s upset about anything. They just have such joy and particularly this revival seems to have made a lot of people happy and there's just nothing better.

Can you confirm for us Travelers series 3 and Will & Grace series 11 are both going to happen?

Yes, yeah, well I'm shooting Travelers 3 right now in fact this afternoon. I directed the first episode of series 3 and I'm just looking at my partner's cut of it and yeah we're doing two more Will & Graces, each of 18 episodes, so I’ve got my work cut out for me for a while, which is just incredible.

Your son is in his late teens now but when he was young how did he handle seeing his dad as gay on TV?

Well he kind of fell between the cracks that way because he was 3 when it went off the air and it quieted down for a while. About the time he was kind of 7 or 8 and at school he was aware I was known but I' started to do a show called Perception when he was he was 9 so his version of my celebrity was more through that show.He’d heard of Will & Grace but he never really watched it and I don't think it meant all that much to him. But now with the revival three generations are watching it, grandmothers are watching it with their grandkids. Now he's starting to appreciate what the show was and what it meant in the landscape. We did a great big thing at the Paley Media Center in LA to honour the show and we did a big thing at the Kodak Center in New York and more but 3000 people showed up to hear a panel about us and ask questions and he was there and that was the first time it dawned on him, the social import of the show, but also just of me playing that role. Kids his age, at least in our school, don't think about being gay as any sort of problem. Kids are coming out as bisexual when they're 13 and they're putting it on Instagram and it's just nomal. None of them realise what we, what our generation went through, paving the way for that kind of ease, you know?

We only just got marriage equality here in this country, a huge step for us. 

I didn't realise it was so recent. That's fantastic! Congratulations. And thanks for the interview. I appreciate you talking about both shows, it means a lot to me. Thank you.