The panel for Jerry Bruckheimer's military drama "E-Ring" on NBC is coming in for questions about everything from why Benjamin Bratt's character, an officer at the Pentagon, won't be married and a new father, the way he was in the pilot, to whether or not he'll still be riding his bike to work.

We also wonder how he feels about being a sex symbol. (Not so good.)

This is the kind of dance we tend to do when the actors are more interesting to us than the project, and it leads to a series of questions of Bratt's co-star, Dennis Hopper, that basically boil down to:

Did you ever expect to look this good at this age?

Or be alive, for that matter?

The once-harder living Hopper's bio doesn't give his age, but does mention a 2-year-old daughter, and IMDB.com says he's 69 (which means that he looks even better than I'd thought, though it wasn't my question in the first place).

Anyway, even if we're not very interested in "E-Ring," Hopper wants us to know he is, and that what's more, he had choices.

"I'm probably dropping a million and a half dollars a year taking this job," he says.

On the other hand. he knows where he'll be working for the next little while, at least.

In the movie business, "You never know what scripts you're getting and you never know what country you're going to to make them," he says.