Here’s What Happened to Actor Eric McCormack Before, During and After Both Versions of ‘Will and Grace’

Explains Jim, “Tracy Lilienfield, who was the casting director, had Eric McCormack on her radar from early on. He had been in Lonesome Dove and was doing high-profile projects. Not that a sitcom isn’t one, but sometimes people get in that movie mindset. Eric didn’t really want to commit to playing Will and initially turned down the role. It was only later, while laying in bed at night next to his wife, when he said, ‘I think I made a mistake’ and her saying, ‘Yeah, I think you did.’ He called them and said, ‘You know what? I changed my mind.’ Luckily the role was still open.”

Eric James McCormack was born on April 18, 1963, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Eric first developed a love for acting in high school when he performed in student plays. Although he attended Ryerson University, he left in 1985 to accept an offer that turned into a five-year position with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. “I was a journeyman moving up through the company,” Eric told the New York Daily News in 2001, “so it was a lot of playing character parts and understudying.  I had a couple of romantic roles, but I never knew what to do with myself, and a lot of the people in charge weren’t sure what to do with me, because I didn’t give off a lot of leading-man vibes. It took me a long time to get to the point where it feels right that I get the girl. Oddly enough, the most ‘leading man’ I ever felt was playing Will. It took playing a gay man to find my strong leading-man side.”

In 1986 he made his Canadian television debut in the movie The Boys from Syracuse. Relocating to Los Angeles, in 1991 he appeared on the CBS series Top Cops, followed in 1992 by a film version of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. He had a recurring role in the 1993 crime drama series Street Justice, which was followed in 1994 with the regular role of Colonel Francis Clay Mosby in Lonesome Dove: The Series. After failing to be cast as Ross Geller in Friends (he auditioned twice), he made some other guest appearances. Looking back at it all, though, he truly appreciated the fact he got to do Lonesome Dove. “It established something for me,” he told Canada’s Edmonton Journal, “because when people see it now, it’s ‘Holy cow!’ It’s so 180 degrees from Will. It’s hard in this business to get the opportunities to show off range.”

In 1998, of course, he was cast as Will Truman for the pilot of Will & Grace. “From the moment I read for Will, I thought, ‘This is me,’” Eric noted to The Los Angeles Times at the time. “He was me in every other way except sexuality. I can be controlling, but I’m a great host. I’m a good friend. I’m a really good listener. Many of my closest friends are women. And also gay men. I spent years in theater. I’ve lived with them. I know gay men and I know there’s as much a variety in that community as there is in anybody else.  With Will and Jack, we show two different gay men, polar opposites, but they are still only two. They cannot carry the weight of all homosexuality on their back.”

Speaking to The Signal of Santa Clarita, California in 2005, he said of the pilot, “When shooting was finished that night, Debra and I were sitting on the couch and looking at each other, and I said, ‘We’re gonna be on this set for a while.’ We sort of clasped hands, but we didn’t want to say anything beyond that and jinx it.”

While waiting on word from NBC if the pilot was going to go to series, Eric shot the indie film Free Enterprise. Says that movie’s cowriter and producer Mark A. Altman, “Working with Eric McCormack was a sheer joy. He was so smart, funny, talented and an absolute delight on our picture, which was about two Star Trek fans who meet their idol, William Shatner, and find out he’s more screwed up than they are. When we were auditioning him for the role of Mark, he had just shot the pilot for Will & Grace and was wondering whether or not it would get picked up. He was so confident on stage, but I remember when he returned for the callback, I looked out my window and saw Eric pacing nervously in the parking lot worriedly about his audition. I opened the window and yelled out, ‘Don’t worry, you got this.’ I think he was mortified that I saw him, but it was prophetic as he got the role and was terrific in the part — and it remains the role he’s most associated with other than Will. I remember a few days into filming, Bill Shatner came up to me and said, ‘You know, this guy is really good.’ I smiled and said, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

The success that followed thanks to Will & Grace was something he was grateful for, but despite what other people might think, it wasn’t like he was an overnight success. “I have accomplished a lot,” he observed in 2003, “but it didn’t happen overnight for me. I was 35 when I got the show and had been working professionally for 15 years. It would be a lot weirder if I were in my early 20s and stumbled into it. But I was ready for it and I knew I could do it.”

The first person that Jim Colucci interviewed for his Will & Grace book was Eric. He enthuses, “The thing that I have to say about Eric that impressed me, probably before I even met him and had just read interviews with him, is that, first all, for a straight man to take the part of a gay man in 1998 was still somewhat courageous. Especially if you consider back in the ‘70s or ‘80s if a straight guy played gay, his agent would advise him, ‘You’re ruining your career. This is a huge risk.’ When Eric was originally offered the part of Will Truman and initially turned it down, you could be cynical and think, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s a straight guy afraid to play gay,’ and I really don’t think that’s what it was. It’s almost the opposite of that. It’s such a positive that he didn’t want to let the gay community down by being their sole representative and feeling like he might not be qualified. So rather than say, ‘Oh, I’m taking a personal risk,’ he turned it down out of modesty that ‘I don’t want to overstep my bounds and speak for a community that I don’t rightfully represent.’ Thank God he changed his mind, because he did such a great job as the character and the character did such great things for the LGBT community.”

In the summer of 2001, Eric made his way to Broadway to take on the lead role in The Music Man in the part originated by Robert Preston in 1962. For the actor, it felt like he had come full circle, that 20 years later he was back doing the sort of thing he had aspired for. In the 1980s, he’d drifted away from singing due to the fact that the demand was more focused on the training of operatic singers for shows like Les Miserables or the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim. “There were no more songs,” he told The Californian at the time. “Everything was arias. There was no fun song-and-dance schtick unless you were going to do revivals, which weren’t happening as much.

“For me,” he continued, “the biggest journey has been the journey toward leading man. The closest I’ve ever come to being a traditional Cary Grant-ish witty leading man is the gay man I play on television. I couldn’t have done this a few years ago. I needed to be 38. I needed to have Will & Grace under my belt for a few years. I needed to have what I have now to be able to walk on that stage and believe.”

Between 2000 and 2016, Eric appeared in 12 feature films and several TV movies, including playing Mel Ferrer in The Audrey Hepburn Story. On top of that, he appeared in the sci-fi miniseries The Andromeda Strain and had a recurring role on The New Adventures of Old Christine. Between 2010 and 2013, fans could hear his voice as Lucky in the animated series Pound Puppies. There were also a couple of his own series between the two versions of Will & Grace.

‘Trust Me’ (2009)

The setting is the fictional advertising agency of Rothman, Greene and Moore and the storylines revolve around the challenges of obtaining clients and the personal lives of those working there. Eric is Mason McGuire, the newly promoted creative director, is a straight-laced family man who serves as a counterbalance to the firm’s copywriter, Conner (Tom Cavanagh, currently one of the stars of the CW’s The Flash), whose behavior is considered to be unpredictable. Says Wikipedia, “Mason is highly neurotic. He works well with Conner, because of their work ethic, but he has workaholic tendencies that affect his marriage.”

“I remember reading this script two years ago,” Eric said in 2009, “and thinking, ‘Ah! This is a grownup show,’ and that’s hard to do anymore. We live in a High School Musical kind of world these days. Mason is the next logical step for me. He’s the responsible one in a crazy world. I’ve been offered hour dramas, which was surprising given my background. I didn’t want to be a cop or a lawyer or a doctor. I wanted something else. I didn’t want to do a sitcom, because nothing could live up to the experience I had. So I waited for that thing, whatever it was, and hoped I’d know it when I saw it. When I saw this script, I knew this was what I was waiting for.”

‘Perception’ (2012 to 2015)

In this drama, Eric is Dr. Daniel J. Pierce, a brilliant neuropsychiatrist whose suffering from paranoid schizophrenia actually serves as an asset in helping the FBI solve some of their most complex cases. The show really did allow Eric to run a gamut of emotions. “This is a character who’s always trying to figure out what makes someone tick,” he told The Sacramento Bee. “Literally tick, up here [he pointed to his head]. Which is why he can sometimes diagnose things that others might’ve missed. And that’s what we’re supposed to do as actors. We’re supposed to be looking objectively. ‘And what is it about his guy? Why did I get this part? What am I going to bring to this that the other guy didn’t walk into the room with?’”

A major appeal is the fact that this was a procedural that’s not really a procedural. “In this case,” he related to collider.com, “procedure is the last thing that Daniel Pierce is going to follow. He’s probably going to screw procedure up, more than anything. He’s not there to look at forensics or have anything to do with guns. He’s simply looking at it from the point of view of a puzzle and, inevitably, because of his expertise, that creates some great twists and turns in this show.”

‘Travelers’ (2016 to 2018)

In an effort to save humanity, people from the future develop a means of projecting their minds backward in time to bodies in the 21^st century, assuming their lives but coordinating together a plan to preserve the race’s extinction. Eric is Grant MacLaren (also known as Traveler 3468), the leader of the team who assumes the life of a married FBI special agent.  Speaking to parade.com, Eric said, “What I was drawn to from the beginning is that the time travel part of it is not like old Time Tunnel movies. The time thing happens pretty quickly and then we’re here. We’re in 2016 and we’re carrying out our job. So it really becomes much more of a domestic espionage show within the first 10 minutes.”

The Return of ‘Will & Grace’ (2017 to 2020)

Jim suggests that our pop culture memories become shorter all the time, and that we tend to remember things that were on when we were in a specific age group. For that reason, the 11 years between the two phases of Will & Grace is actually a long time for a new generation of people. Particularly, he says, in the LGBT community to not have the show fresh in their memories or recognizing quite how big the impact of the original was — back at a time that is actually very different from today. “There’s a very big difference between preaching to the choir and airing a gay show during the Obama administration or, say 2015, even though the show wasn’t in production when the Supreme Court passed gay marriage, and doing it now when trans people are being kicked out of the military and we’re being told there are exemptions for doctors not to treat gay people. The point being that airing Will & Grace now is certainly making a statement. It’s a little bit of a different statement than they made when they were on the first time, because they had a new thing to push back against.”

‘Atypical’ (2019-2021)

Following Travelers, Eric continues his association with Netflix by taking on a recurring role in the third season of this streaming service series. In the show, which features Keir Gilchrist as 18-year-old Sam Gardner, who is autistic, Eric plays Professor Shinerock, Sam’s art professor at Denton University. The show returns in 2021 for its fourth and final season, and Eric is expected to be a part of it.

In his personal life, Eric (who won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series in 2000) met Janet Leigh Holden on the set of Lonesome Dove, whom he married in 1997, and they’re parents of a son. Additionally, he became a U.S. citizen in 1999 and now has citizenship both here and in his native Canada. He’s involved in a number of charitable organizations, including Project Angel Food, the Rape Foundation, Elton John AIDS Foundation, Alzheimer’s Association, National Breast Cancer Coalition, ASPCA and the Human Rights Campaign. On September 13, 2018, he was given the 2,644th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Ana Martinez, producer of the Walk of Fame ceremonies, commented, “Eric McCormack is one of the funniest and talented actors around and we are thrilled to be honoring him. He’s a national treasure, even though he’s Canadian, and what makes this ceremony extra special is that his star will be next to the star of his Will & Grace sidekick, Debra Messing, which further solidifies their great history and achievement together. Will & Grace is a very special show, one that has been a groundbreaker for modern television and continues to make us laugh 20 years later.”

As he says goodbye to Will Truman for a second time (if we’re lucky, somewhere down the road there will be a third), two things Eric has shared about the show come to mind. One he expressed to the Democrat and Chronicle in 2017, pointing out that when the series first started in 1998, there was an attempt to somewhat downplay the gay “element” of the show. “Now,” he said, “the message is ‘we are us’ and we represent a lot of people in the country, gay and straight. We’re not apologizing for who we are.”

In an interview with Britain’s theguardian.com, he pointed out that he’d played a number of gay characters over the years, but they were more or less finite, either in plays or in a guest star role. Never as a series regular. “My only reservation about Will,” he said, “was whether the gay community would accept him. That was very important. I wasn’t worried about typecasting; I thought I’d figure that out down the road. I figured that, with the quality of the show, Will was going to be my epitaph. It was more about, ‘Is this the one character I want beside my name for the rest of eternity?’ and I decided that it was. No matter what else I’ll do, I’ll be the guy from Will & Grace and that’s fine by me.”