Paul McCrane

Paul McCrane: I love film -- I really enjoy it. I like working in it -- I love making money -- I'm grateful for TV, too, and I've had a lot of fun with it. Film and television are different challenges for an actor than theater though.

Paul McCrane (on his death scenes over the years): I've got to say, I've had an interesting history of disturbing scenes. There is that one, and I was in the remake of The Blob, in which I got sort of pulled through a door, breaking my back in the process, and in another film I got blown up. Then, of course, there's ER demise, where the helicopter destroyed me.

Paul McCrane: I got interested in the theater because my father has been involved as an actor in Philadelphia for as long as I can remember. I went to see him in a lot of plays, and I can remember going backstage after a performance and being amazed that these rickety little sets had supported a whole world that I had been completely emeshed in. That's probably the first time I had a sense that there was something magical about that world.

Paul McCrane (on his thoughts on how ER has changed): I was still on the show when most of the current cast had at least joined — like Maura Tierney, Mekhi Phifer but there are a couple of new faces. It's sort of 'ER: The Next Generation' right now, and I think that was a conscious decision made on the part of the producers. The format of the show is such that it allows for that. As long as they keep introducing and writing interesting new characters, it gives them new vantage points from which to tell these inherently dramatic stories. In some franchises, it's silly when they try to revolve the door a little bit, but with ER it makes sense. It's an interesting confluence of personal and dramatic stories in the life and death atmosphere of the ER.

Paul McCrane (on his character Robert Romano in ER): He called it as he saw it, as abrasive as that may have been. That was one of the fun things about the character — he was, for the most part, a two-dimensional Snidely Whiplash kind of guy. They allowed him to actually have occasional flashes of humanity and rationale to his arguments.

Paul McCrane (on his role as Robert Romano in ER): You can't just hate him; well, you can really hate him, but there's something that's sort of attractive in how much you want to strangle the guy.