P: Well, Joe, now you know you're breaking a lot of women's hearts here in your personal life. I'm getting to the baby question on the personal end.

J: Oh, okay.

P: But first let's talk about the fact that...

J: Nice segue!

P: That you're getting married here real soon, aren't you?

J: Well, probably during my hiatus. Yeah, we're kinda keeping the date secret as of right now only because of that's the way we wanted to do it. We're just having a little private wedding.

P: That's nice. That's refreshing for a celebrity like yourself.

J: None of the big hoopla stuff. I get paid to do this. That's my day.

P: You're not really into all the press coverage and all that are you? I hear you're kind of a shy guy.

J: Well, yeah, it's not ... it's not really by design, it's just the way I feel about it, you know. I'm sick of seeing Michael Jackson and a few other people, and I don't want anybody to get sick of seeing me, hopefully.

P: Well, I don't think that's going to happen at all. Although Joe, I did want to ask you about a rumor that I heard kind of going around that maybe we're going to see a little bit less of you next season. Is that true?

J: At this point, and what is today's date, March 26th?, I still don't know. As far as I know, I'm in the next episode of the sixth year, and I hope to do the reoccurring thing, which they've offered me, but you know everything's still in the works. We all saw "Jerry Maguire" ... (laughter)

P: "Show me the money!" But what would Dr. Quinn be without her husband Sully? I mean I can't imagine the series going on if something happens to you.

J: Oh, well, it's not a question of me wanting to leave. It's just how much time I'm going to be putting in here. And if not, if I'm here as a semi-regular, it's a great opportunity for me to cultivate my personal life and more of my professional life, you know. I'm always looking for the next gig, cause I was an out-of-work actor for about, oh, 8 years, so ...

P: I heard that your hands were actually seen on camera before your face. Can you tell me about that?

J: It was almost at the same time. In fact, I watched my very first on-screen movie gig last night, it was on late ... "Star Trek". But around that same time I was asked by Lawrence Kasdan to be the consultant on a movie called "I Love You to Death" and those are my hands in the beginning of the movie. They're supposed to be Kevin Kline's slicing, and doing all these magical things in the kitchen, cause I was a chef for years and years.

P: A man who cooks!

J: I wasn't a starving actor and I didn't want to be that!

P: So who's going to do the cooking in your new marriage?

J: Actually Kirsten and I cook a lot. And, that's my fiancee, Kirsten and those are the babies on the show if you can hear them crying in the background so right now we live in a house with a really lame kitchen (it's electric) and we can't do too good of cooking there, but the new kitchen that we're building in our new house is going to be quite nice.

P: Tell me about it.

J: Well, it's going to have a six-burner oven, uh stove, and double ovens and a little pizza oven, cause I you know don't want to forget my roots, and actually my fiancee and I met while I was a cook in a kitchen and she was the cashier.

P: That's great! So, I mean, she met you and you met her before all this Dr. Quinn stuff happened.

J: ... our ninth anniversary of knowing each other and, for the past eight years, we've been together most of that time.

P: Do you have any specialties in the kitchen? Is pizza something you like to make?

J: Pizza's just something that I learned to cook. I make a mean deep-dish, Chicago-style pizza, and I saute shrimp and onions and put it on top and then bake it in a big skillet. So that's why we're going to have a pizza oven in the house. Other than that I'm just a ... my forte is Italian food.

P: So do you have to watch your weight at all?

J: Well, I try to eat sensibly because you know in this job you only get so much time to exercise and when you're done working, you really don't feel like doing anything you're just a big slob. So I kinda eat light while I'm at work and then I pig out at night. No big burritos for breakfast or anything like that, but ...

P: Because I mean you got to watch that, what with a lot of the romantic scenes that they have you and Jane do here and off comes the shirt!

J: Those dreaded shirtless scenes that we all fear, unless you're on Baywatch - those guys are in good shape, but us, we're just a bunch of cowboy Western-type actors, so we're not in great shape but we try to stay relatively svelte.

P: I think a lot of women would disagree with that assessment, but I do have a question about those romantic scenes. How do you? I personally cannot imagine if I was doing a romantic scene with someone else and my husband was watching, much less having you and Jane are doing a romantic scene and her husband is directing, how in the world do you do that?

J: It's just really by the numbers. You hear everybody say that in interviews about doing love scenes and you know you get a little nervous but our love scenes... this is TV PG, you know, so it's relatively, it's nothing like you'd even see in a soap opera and soap operas were my training ground, so and I used to fight them then, too. I was like ... I just don't want to do the gratuitous getting out of the shower with a towel wrapped around me, so I used to be really nervous about doing those. But the ones we do here on Dr. Quinn are pretty ... pretty simple and very ... very clean.

P: When you say by the numbers, what do you mean?

J: Well, there's things you have to work with. There's camera angles that once you shoot a master you have to be aware of later on, and the camera's going to be over this shoulder, and it's going to be over in this direction and the lights are going to be here and there, and so you have to take all that into consideration and, you know, is Jane going to take the right side or am I going to take the left side when we kiss you actually have to coordinate that stuff for the next shot.

P: Have you ever bumped noses or anything?

J: Oh yeah, and there's been times when we're in a hot place and I have to kiss Jane and I wear this dark makeup and she's so fair-skinned that when we separate she looks like she's been eating chocolate pie or something, but ....

P: And what does Kirsten say when she's watching you and Jane have a passionate kiss on DQMW?

J: Well, Kirsten's been with me for a long time and she understands the nature of my business and she's better about it than I think I could ever be. And sometimes she just happens to have to get up to get something to drink or something during those scenes.

P: I don't blame her, I don't blame her.

J: Time to visit the fridge.

P: I don't want to keep you from lunch because I know it's lunchtime here on the set. But can we count on you to call Sonny and I on the morning show?

J: Sure. I'll call you from the truck again.

P: I remember that. You were in traffic or something.

J: Didn't I talk to you both times from the truck?

P: Yeah, you did. The first time it was both Sonny and I. The second time I'd lined it up with your people and then I got sick that day. I was just ... I was dying. I was lying in bed listening to you talk to Sonny, going "now this is Joe! This is like one of my favorite people. I can't believe I'm sick this day!" So it's really a pleasure to meet you in person!

J: It's nice to meet you, Pat. Say hello to Sonny and I look forward to talking to you folks.

P: And good luck with Dr. Quinn!

J: And good luck with you!

Transcribed by Trudy Gerovske

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