Is it awkward to play a character that was written for you? It seems like it would be odd.
Nope. I do like it. I'm a terrific fan of Craig Wright's. He's a great writer and I'm blessed to have worked with some great writers in television.

So why are your characters married to women named Lisa?
Why are my characters married to people named Lisa? This is the second time to my knowledge.

Third. Sports Night, too.
Was she Lisa?

The ex-wife, yeah.
She was? I forgot. Not to any designer request of mine. I’d forgotten that. Lisa on Six Feet Under perhaps obliterated the never-seen ex-wife on Sports Night because she died and I had to bury her. Craig Wright wrote that episode actually.

Production was halted for a while on Dirty, right? After episode five? Have you guys been off for a little while?
We were going to take a hiatus and let the writers catch up and then we discovered that, based upon some work we did after the second episode, we wanted to go back and retool episode number two. It takes a while for a TV series to find itself. Not all are born fully formed like Six Feet Under. Dealing with a network is different than dealing with a cabler like HBO. They have different concerns.

So what actually happened?
We found that we struck a tone, and the style for the show in episodes three and four was really working and there were things in episode two which needed to change to fit in with the show that we're developing and finding.

Is it a hard way to work? To have to go back?
No, not at all. It's part of the process in launching a TV series when you want to not only grab your audience's attention but you don't want to lose their attention. Episode two lacked a certain amount of gravity that we have in the pilot that episodes three and four did. It probably erred on the too silly side.

Do you not find the show funny?
I do find the show funny, yes.

But it wasn't the right kind of funny?
Not necessarily the wrong kind, just too much funny. Can there be too much funny, Margaret? [Laughs] There were certain story elements that needed to be more grounded than they were during the initial version of episode two. We don't want the audience to have a difficult time taking our characters seriously.

I guess I see the show as more of a soap than an aggressive drama.
Oh yeah, definitely. It's very entertaining. It's very funny. It's a question of balance. If you allow the characters and situations to become so silly then doing it dramatically, you can't take them seriously. You blow the balance of the show, if you will. We want to be able to have both working for us.

You’ve said you didn’t want to do another show because it meant a six-year commitment. What changed that made you ready to commit now?
I wanted to play the character. I wanted to have the world that Craig and I had talked about and deal with some of the issues we've spoken about. And it also seemed like it'd be a lot of fun. It really had to do with the writing. I read a lot of feature scripts and things like that. I find that the writers I've worked with in television have provided me with better material than I see in the film world, generally speaking. And it's fun to play a character over a period of time. It's just a lot of work. It's a big commitment. I've said it before, but TV is like a marriage, a film or play is like an affair.

So I saw a YouTube clip of your episode of Ellen from 1994. Is it weird that stuff is so accessible?
 I was in New York doing a play a little over three years ago and HBO On Demand was on. There was an episode of SFU on that I hadn't seen so I turned it on. I was watching it and there I was simulating intercourse on television. I thought to myself, oh, On Demand, I get it. There's just soft pornography with me in it just available to anyone all over the world. So yes, it is weird it's just all out there. It's weird that it's on YouTube. I would believe that it'd be illegal.

I think it is. But I don’t think there are lawyers hunting for old clips of Ellen, really.
I didn't know they could do that. As I recall, I had really long hair because I was about to shoot the pilot for a series called The Great Defender and I wanted to cut my hair because I thought I looked like little Lord Fauntleroy [or] the kid on the Dutch Boy paint can.

It’s not your best look. Back to Dirty: In the first episode Nick is pretty reserved and pretty anxious-does he loosen up over the course or is that his intention to relax?
Yeah, absolutely. It's all very charged because of his relationship with Karen [Darling] when he was young and the possibility that Tripp [Darling] may have something to do with his father's death, and the new knowledge for him that his father is having an affair with Letitia Darling. All that soapy stuff.

I mean that stuff can be soapy, but there's also plenty of that kind of stuff on Six Feet Under...
Yeah, that's life really. I thought Six Feet Under was really soapy sometimes. Especially in the later seasons.

Do you like playing soapy?
No, I don't mean in terms of style, but in terms of storytelling. I like that sort of soap opera. And [Dirty] has elements of all of those things actually, which is really nice about the show. You get to do it all.