I was doing Hamlet in the off-season, and I had a specific idea in my mind about what I wanted that character to look like, and because it's going to lead into the next year, I knew that it was going to have to be established somewhere in the show.
It's absolutely true that it's almost impossible to play a character without having any affection for him.
So I think at the start of the 3rd year, that's when the character became sort of more like myself than it was about the original interpretation.
I think I'd certainly be lying to say I would have wanted to play the character in somebody else's interpretation for 8 years that way.