Sept. 25 (UPI) — Eric McCormack says he stayed friends with Debra Messing during the 11-year gap between Seasons 8 and 9 of their sitcom Will & Grace.

“The nice thing about Deb and I is that we really have kept in touch. Not constantly, but once, maybe twice a year, we’d have dinner, often in New York, which is always fun. It’s fun to be Will and Grace and go and have fun in New York somewhere unannounced. Forks drop… People think they are on TV. We both have kids, so we’ve maintained kind of an ongoing conversation that, I think if we hadn’t, this would have been a harder sand box to jump back into, but it was all very natural,” McCormack said at Saturday’s Tribeca TV Festival in Manhattan.

The show initially ran 1998-2006. It will return to NBC with fresh episodes Thursday.