Eric James McCormack (born April 18, 1963) is a Canadian-American actor known for his roles as Will Truman in the NBC sitcom Will & Grace, Grant MacLaren in Netflix's Travelers, and Dr. Daniel Pierce in the TNT crime drama Perception.
Born in Toronto, McCormack started acting by performing in high school plays. He left Ryerson University in 1985 to accept a position with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, where he spent five years performing in many stage productions.
During the late 1990s he lived in Los Angeles and had minor roles. He made his feature film debut in the 1992 science-fiction adventure film The Lost World. McCormack appeared in several television series including Top Cops, Street Justice, Lonesome Dove: The Series, Townies, and Ally McBeal. He later gained worldwide recognition for playing Will Truman in Will & Grace, which premiered in September 1998. His performance has earned him six Golden Globe nominations and four Emmy nominations, winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series in 2001.
Aside from appearing in television, he made his Broadway debut in the 2001 production of The Music Man and starred in the 2005 film The Sisters. Following the series conclusion of Will & Grace in 2006, McCormack starred as the leading role in the New York production of Some Girl(s). He starred in the television miniseries The Andromeda Strain (2008) and returned to television in 2009 in the TNT drama Trust Me, which was cancelled after one season. Also in 2009, McCormack was cast in the science-fiction movie Alien Trespass. In addition, he starred as Dr. Daniel Pierce for three seasons of the TNT crime drama Perception, and provided the voice of "Lucky" on The Hub's Pound Puppies. From 2009 to 2010 he starred as Dr. Max Kershaw, the psychiatrist turned boyfriend of Julia Louis-Dreyfus' title character in The New Adventures of Old Christine. He is currently performing on Broadway in The Cottage.
Early life
McCormack was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of Doris (1932–2006), a homemaker, and James "Keith" McCormack, an oil company financial analyst who died from cancer in 2008. He is the oldest of three siblings. Eric McCormack has Scottish ancestry. While he was growing up, he was shy and did not play sports but was involved in theatre from an early age: "I was a bit of an outsider, but I discovered theatre very early on, which got me through."He later attended Sir John A. Macdonald Collegiate Institute in Scarborough, Ontario, where he was a classmate of David Furnish. He enrolled in theatre classes there and performed in high school productions of Godspell and Pippin. McCormack recalls that after performing in Godspell, his feelings toward becoming an actor solidified and he decided to pursue a career in acting. "I remember after the first performance of that... I knew where to fit in. That was the beginning of my life as an actor. It changed me in that the concept of any other options disappeared. From that moment there was no question. I knew exactly what I was going to do. I'm lucky that way."
McCormack graduated from high school in 1982 and enrolled at Ryerson University School of Theatre in Toronto to further develop as an actor. He left Ryerson in 1985, several months before graduating, to accept a position with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario where he spent five seasons performing. "It was all I wanted, to be a classical actor for the rest of my life, but during the last couple of years I was there, 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." He appeared in productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry V, Murder in the Cathedral and Three Sisters. He later performed with the Manitoba Theatre Centre in a production of Burn This, as well as with Toronto's Royal Alexandra Theatre in Biloxi Blues.
