I never imagined I would have this kind of career.

That was the Hayden.

You had Seinfeld, you had friends.

So there was all these great comedies, and we got to be a part of that.

That is probably not coming back now since the advent of streaming, which blew up the whole system,

where we shot the middle, which is on Warner Ranch, which is around the corner from Warner Brothers,

and it used to house like the Walton House and the Leithel Weapon House and the Friends Fountain was all there and that was all raised to the ground. And they built a ton of soundstages. And then

pandemic happened and the strike cellar all happened. And on the Paramount lot, there's just a bunch of

empty sound stages there now. A really veteran comedy writer said he was in a writer's room where a bunch of the writers were in their 20s. And they had a character that was like a Marine and he didn't like to hug anybody. He didn't want guys hugging him. He would like tense up. And one of the young writers said, well, that's really homophobic. We can't write that.

And so there's a certain wokeness, I think, in some young people.

That you're Catholic? Pro-life. You're pro-Israel. How much of that were you talking about

sort of publicly way back when versus now you're extremely outspoken, obviously?

The thing that I think a lot of people outside of Hollywood have a misconception about, even though

actors, myself included, will state our political opinions, when you're working, you're just

trying to make a show successful and that you should be conscious that there might be somebody

who has a different opinion. You know, you have Tildas Swinton and you have Mark Ruffalo and you have Benedict Cumberbatch

and all these folks who live a very privileged life because the same people who were standing

up in Hollywood against what Israel was doing in Gaza stayed silent when Boko Haram in Nigeria

were murdering Christians.

All right, Patricia Heaton, you're not getting a proper intro read off the teleprompter

because I can describe you as legendary actress, cookbook author,

activist, Twitter, fighter a little bit lately. But mostly, you are like an old friend to me somehow,

...