But I was ready for it and I knew I could do it. I've just turned 40, I have a son and I feel more settled and driven than ever. I think my 40s will be my most prolific time. It's a very rare life you get to lead as a sitcom guy.

I have accomplished a lot, 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.

Will isn't a screaming queen - that's Jack's part. They needed someone to play the part for America. It's just not the same as Britain. To have a gay character as a lead is risky.

I started to realise that it wasn't for me. Perhaps I didn't have to give my Hamlet before I died, that the world might be an OK place without my Hamlet, in fact.

There was a time when history was written by a few people, the winners. Now, history is written by all of us all the time... That's the thing we keep telling our 14-year-olds, you know: anything you do right now, it's not going anywhere.

I never felt cool growing up. I was a bit of an outsider, but I discovered theatre very early on, which got me through.

I'm not sure sometimes if it was because Will was gay or it was a sitcom. But that combination does make it hard to become the new lead on the 'Sopranos.'

I think I was very lucky that I didn't get well-known until my early thirties. If it had happened when I was younger, you might have seen me falling out of nightclubs. I think I conducted myself as a much better human being because I was already married when all that came along (I got married five months after I got the role as Will).

I think we all realize that anyone can - and has - gotten AIDS. So there's obviously still a lot to be done.

In the future, things will truncate! No, in the age of Twitter, we can't be upset when words become shorter.

I'm doing a very funny show in which we talk about issues. I speak at Aids charities and things. It's great to do something fun with our days and yet we're told we're doing something important.

Will Truman will be on my epitaph, but as an actor, I have to challenge myself.

Mental illness is the last frontier. The gay thing is part of everyday life now on a show like 'Modern Family,' but mental illness is still full of stigma. Maybe it is time for that to change.

As I got older, I realized that my life experience, what I really had, was always going to be more valuable than what I pretended to have.

We want all LGBTQ kids to grow up in a world where they feel safe and equal to their straight peers.

I'm torn about late parenting. I believe people should spend their twenties living and having fun and not having any regrets later. I also think people in their thirties generally make better parents but so many of my friends are having trouble - myself included - as fathers get older.

I did my first musical in 4th grade as Huck Finn. By 11th grade, I was starring in 'Godspell' and 'Pippin' and pretending to be Che in 'Evita' in my bedroom. Singing has always been a huge part of me.

I'm still a kid. I stretched it out.

At home in L.A., Sunday is lazy. It's the wife and me lying in bed with coffee, watching 'The Soup' or something funny on TiVo. The kid will occasionally join us. Eventually, breakfast is at a place down the street called Paty's. And we always have some kind of great dinner - my wife makes a great roast beef.

I hope that dog lovers around the world will support the Cruelty Free International global campaign to end the use of dogs in outdated and cruel experiments.

The States doesn't think much about Canada, but we're attached. We're like Siamese twins. We can't do things - you can't roll over in the American bed without waking up the Canadians. It matters.

Unfortunately, with men's health, we don't talk about it enough, and prostate cancer gets lost in the conversation.

You can write your own history.

The Trevor Project provides crisis-intervention and suicide-prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning teens and young adults. It's truly a lifeline to so many young people who just need someone to listen to them.