David Hyde Pierce on gay marriage and his return to television in “The Good Wife”

David Hyde Pierce, winner of four Emmy Awards for his performance as Niles Crane on the sitcom Frasier, married longtime partner Brian Hargrove in California in 2008.

Since then, same-sex marriage has become legal in 35 US states plus the District of Columbia which the actor is ‘amazed’ by.

‘I’m amazed of the sort of domino effect with same-sex marriage happening throughout the states,’ Pierce told Larry King this week on Larry King Now.

‘It had to do with visibility (and) all the brave people who fought for marriage,’ he said.

Pierce added it has also been due to ‘just the average American looking at these people or looking at friends or family who are gay or lesbian and realizing (gay marriage bans are) kind of hypocritical.’

‘It just seems more important to let people live their lives. It seems in a way, more American.

Pierce, 55, came out publicly in 2007 – the year he won the Tony Award for the play Curtains.

During his acceptance speech, he thanked ‘my partner, Brian, because it’s 24 years of listening to your damn notes—that’s why I’m up here tonight.’

Pierce recently returned to series television for the first time since Frasier ended its run in 2004 with a recurring role on the CBS drama The Good Wife.

“I’ve always chosen my projects based on the quality of the writing and who I would get to work with, it’s what I did with ‘Frasier’. And this show has such great writing, it’s a lot of good writing on television nowadays, it seems to be sort of a golden age of television, but this show is particularly well written and I have so many friends in it.”