He eventually largely stopped discussing it in interviews — whether because he had said what he had to say, because he found the question intrusive, or because the story had settled into something he no longer needed to process publicly. When he did discuss it, his statements were consistent across years: dramatic but not traumatizing, clarifying rather than destabilizing, and received with something that could, accurately, be called gratitude.
The gratitude deserves its own examination. Gratitude for what, exactly? For having been raised by people who cared for him? For having learned the truth rather than never learning it? For the fact that his biological mother had not had an abortion, which is one dimension he has mentioned in the context of his stance on reproductive rights?
He has said he is, in his own words, “positively against” abortion, and that he is “contra” his Hollywood constituency on the issue. He has framed his position explicitly in the context of his own existence: his mother was a teenager who became pregnant under difficult circumstances, and she did not terminate the pregnancy. He is alive partly because of that choice. His gratitude for the discovery and his gratitude for his existence are connected in his own telling: the revelation taught him something about where he came from, and what he came from included a choice to bring him into the world that his biological mother made under pressures that would have made a different choice entirely understandable.
That is a coherent account. It is also, it should be noted, an account built after the fact, from the vantage point of a man who had become one of the most successful actors in American cinema. The account is true to his experience. It cannot, and does not, speak to the experience of his biological mother, who made the choice from inside circumstances that his success could not have illuminated at the time.