Leading TV Actors Ponder Their Craft & Professional Embarrassments

Reporters from The Hollywood Reporter sat down with two groups of leading dramatic TV actors who were surprisingly willing to talk frankly and openly about their work, the challenges of their craft and their own foibles, sometimes in gruesome detail.

Representing the female actors were The Good Wife's Julianna Margulies, Homeland's Claire Danes, The Closer's Kyra Sedgwick, The Killing's Mireille Enos, Mad Men's January Jones and Shameless' Emmy Rossum. Their male counterparts included Mad Men's Jon Hamm, Homeland's Damian Lewis, Parenthood's Peter Krause, Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston, Touch's Kiefer Sutherland and Boss' Kelsey Grammer.

I found it curious that the tone of the round-table discussions between the women versus the men was starkly different. Whereas the men seemed to be jovially trying to one-up each other with gross and embarrassing tales while they munched on snacks (like cubes of cheese), the women were deferential to one another and had flowers instead of food on the table in front of them. (The men are allowed to eat but the women weren't?)

My favorite parts of the discussions:

• January Jones said that people she sees on the street give her grief for Betty Draper's bad parenting.
• Jones said appearing as "fat Betty" during the fifth season of Mad Men was a pain in the neck due to all the prosthetics she had to wear.
• Peter Krause admitted to once suffering from sudden gastrointestinal problems while acting on stage in a play.
• The Good Wife, Julianna Margulies, struggles with being the "good girl" on her show's set even when she doesn't think she needs to be there all the time, particularly for scenes where she has no lines. Her quote seemed very Katherine Heigl to me, almost a cry for help: "There are days when . . . I had worked until midnight and then I had to go and shoot something else at five in the morning. I looked at my husband and I was like, 'This is why Judy Garland was on pills. I can't keep this up. I need a pill!'"
• Jon Hamm was once told he'd never make it as a TV star.
• Damian Lewis related an anecdote about getting injured on stage -- sustaining a wound that required multiple stitches -- during a sword fight with Ralph Fiennes yet he continued to act as he bled profusely from the face.

 I completely concur with a person who posted a comment on YouTube after the interview with the panel of women who said that this was a fascinatingly interesting discussion, a model for what these types of discussions should be, as opposed to the vacuous fluff that passes for interviews these days.

Notes on Pop Culture: Keaton's Memoir, 'The Descendants,' 'Boss' Rules & Meeting 'Morning Joe'

Diane Keaton’s Charming Memoir

Perhaps Diane Keaton’s Then Again, should be called a “mom-ior” instead of a memoir as Keaton decided that instead of simply writing about her life and loves (Allen, Beatty, Pacino among them), she’d write an autobiography in which she parallels her story with that of her housewife mother Dorothy Hall, someone whom Keaton called the most influential person in her life.

After I finished reading the moving and endearing book -- I was especially fond of Keaton’s honesty and self-effacement -- I wrote a column about it and Keaton's attachment to her mom.

One little nugget of trivia which I found cool: Keaton's parents nicknamed her "Di-Annie." Her given surname was Hall. Di-Annie Hall. Yes, Woody Allen based the flighty lead character of his Oscar winning film Annie Hall on Keaton, whom he’d dated, and some of the characters, including Grammy Hall (which is what Keaton called her father’s loan shark of a mother), were loosely based on Keaton’s family members.

After spending several hours languishing in Keaton's world -- and learning that she drives her kids to very early swimming practices while she sits in her car and waits for them -- I've developed a hankering to see Annie Hall again. I’m also curious about Reds, which I’ve never seen, as Keaton said she thoroughly despised her character when the film was shooting and only emotionally opened up to it during the “train station” scene.


Image credit: Fox Searchlight

The Descendants Asks How Well We Know Our Parents

In the same week in which I finished Aimee Bender’s quirky, cool novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake -- where the protagonist discovers she can discern the feelings of the person who made or harvested her food by tasting it – I also laughed and sniffled my way through the new George Clooney film, The Descendants. When I exited the theater, I was surprised to discover similar themes in both the movie and the book I’d just read, hence my column which asked the question of whether we ever really know our parents, or our children for that matter.

In The Descendants, Clooney plays a distant husband with two kids, who learned, after his wife was critically injured and in a coma, that she’d been cheating on him. The film explores what happens when we open our eyes and really see what’s right in front of you and the fallout when you hide parts of yourself from the ones you love.

In the book, the lead character Rose, who is a child when the book begins, is horrified to discover by tasting the food they made that her mother is severely depressed, her father is dissatisfyingly withdrawn and her older brother is plagued with all manner of unhappy problems. This was knowledge Rose really wished she didn't have.

I didn’t wind up happening upon any unique answers to the question of whether you can really know anybody all that well, but I was thoroughly entertained and moved by both.

Boss Rules

Over on the TV blog to which I contribute – CliqueClack TV -- they recently had a poll asking readers to vote for their favorite new fall show. While I really like some of the top vote-getters like Homeland and Once Upon a Time (which I cover for CliqueClack TV), I made the argument that, despite the fact that Boss is on Starz, which artificially limits the number of viewers it has, it is the shining dark freshman show of the fall season.

After comparing Kelsey Grammer’s fictional Chicago Mayor Tom Kane to Tony Soprano, I wrote: "For a news and political junkie like myself, Boss has everything. It’s like The West Wing, only meaner, more sinister, more profane, violent and set in the gritty underbelly of Chicago politics. And if Grammer doesn’t win an Emmy for best actor in a drama, that’ll be a crime.”

Its first season has been stellar. If you have the chance to check it out, do.

Meeting Morning Joe

I’ve written here numerous times about my love of the MSNBC morning chat show Morning Joe. It’s on my TV every weekday morning, entertaining me, challenging me, angering me and informing me. I’m a fan of the fundamental organizing conceit of the show: To have rational, intellectual discussion about the important issues of the day without chopping everything down to soundbites and without demonizing one political side or the other. Both sides get a voice.

Thus when I attended the Massachusetts Conference for Women in Boston this week, where Morning Joe’s hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski gave the keynote address, and learned that they’d be meeting and greeting folks and signing books, I had to get in line.

They were very gracious and Joe Scarborough was incredulous when I told him that my kids watch Morning Joe along with me as they get ready for school and that my fifth grader has actually gone to school and had arguments with his classmates over tax policy. True story.

The photo quality is pretty cruddy – what do you want from a BlackBerry camera? – but the smiles were genuine.

Image credits: Amazon, Fox Searchlight, Amazon.

'Homeland' & 'Boss:' The Best Shows on TV Right Now

If you get Showtime and/or the Starz Channels, do yourself a favor, start watching Homeland, starring Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin, and Boss, starring Kelsey Grammer in a role that’ll make you say, “Frasier who?”

Both shows are unpredictable. Both of them have shocked and intrigued me and left me craving more. Intelligent and challenging, they are two of the best dramatic offerings you’re going to find airing right now.

A half dozen episodes into Homeland, here are a few of the things viewers have witnessed:

• A Marine sergeant, who’d been held hostage and was tortured in Afghanistan for eight years, was discovered by U.S. troops, after a CIA agent had been told that a U.S. POW had been turned by the enemy and would be used as a tool to hurt Americans.
• That CIA agent, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) set up surveillance in the home of Marine Sgt. Nick Brody where she obsessively watched all the intimate goings on in his house for several weeks, including relations with his wife Jessica (Morena Baccarin who was the alien leader on V), who’d presumed her husband was dead and took up with Nick’s best friend.
• Brody has been secretly reciting Muslim prayers on a prayer rug in his garage and having flashbacks of being held at gunpoint and forced to beat a Marine colleague to death.
• Carrie has serious mental health issues that she’s hiding from the CIA and from her dodgy mentor Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) who seems to have a murky past of his own.
• Brody’s lead torturer, who has affiliations with a terrorist group, was apprehended and Carrie’s supervisor allowed Brody to speak with him. Shortly thereafter, the torturer committed suicide with a razor blade. It was assumed that someone slipped him a blade. Carrie suspects Brody.
• Brody beat the heck out of his former best friend Mike who had become romantically involved with his wife Jessica and later, Brody had drunk sex with Carrie in a car.

 Folks who’ve seen the next new episode are raising expectations to lofty heights. I can’t wait.

A few episodes into Boss, a brutal, profane examination of raw political mayoral power at the epicenter of an old school Chicago machine, we’ve seen: 

• Kingpin Mayor Tom Kane (Grammer) violently grab and twist the ear of a supporter whose underling had made things difficult for one of the mayor’s landmark public projects. Later, the underling who’d gone on TV and caused problems for Kane presented the mayor with a gift box wrapped with a tidy bow. Inside the box? His ears, indicating that he’s now listening. Kane chucked the ears down the garbage disposal in his kitchen sink. 
• Kane is suffering from a degenerative, fatal disease (Lewy Body Dementia) that will compromise his mental functions, cause hallucinations and confusion, as well as affect physical functions. He's been buying drugs from a drug dealer in darkened parks to try to treat curtail his symptoms.
• The neurologist who diagnosed Kane has been assaulted and threatened by a Kane henchman after a pesky newspaper reporter came to visit her and asked questions about the mayor’s health. After that same reporter confronted the mayor’s wife about the neurologist, Kane’s goon demanded that the doctor take her son and flee the city. Immediately. 
• One of Kane’s key staffers has taken to having brazen, risky, adulterous sex in hallways and stairwells of public venues with a young, charismatic, Kane-backed candidate for governor who has a wife and two young children.
• There’s a strange side-story involving Kane’s estranged minister/addict daughter Emma and the icy reaction Kane’s contact with Emma elicited from Kane’s estranged wife Meredith, with whom he no longer shares a bed. 

Between Homeland and Boss, I’ve been left wondering where they’ll take me next.