Actor John Barrowman got on his soapbox when asked about his recent California marriage to longtime partner Scott Gill.

Barrowman, who is best known for playing Captain Jack Harkness on the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who and Torchwood, delivered his epic speech during a Q&A session at Dragon Con in Atlanta.

When an audience member asked Barrowman how it felt for him and Gill to “finally do that” – a reference to getting hitched – Barrowman answered with a chuckle, “We've been doing it for a long time.”

“And sometimes it's a little more painful than others, you know …. I'm talking about marriage,” he joked.

Barrowman said that he felt married when the couple bought their first home.

“That was a lockdown,” he said.

“When [UK] civil partnership came we decided to do it because we wanted to show young people at that time, younger than ourselves, that you can have a life sort of like – I say sort of because civil partnership is not like getting married. It's the closest thing.”

(Related: John Barrowman, Scott Gill marry in California.)

Barrowman said that he had everything: “I got the big house, I got the picket fence, I got the nice car, I go the dogs, we might have children, and I got the wife sitting over there. He's the wife on the Friday night, I'm a wife on a Saturday night.”

Other people say, 'Well, it's a choice.' No, it's not a choice. I live this, I know a lot of you live it. And I didn't decide one morning to get up and go, 'I'm going to have coffee, eggs, bacon and oh, I'm going to be gay.' It doesn't work that way.” (The video is embedded on this page. Visit our video library for more videos.)