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Joined: Feb 2007
Posts: 178,603
| and dawn's interview Quote:
Let’s talk about “House of Lies.” I don’t know how much you can talk about it since it’s just a pilot for now.
It is a pilot now, but it’s great. And it is funny and, knock on wood—grain because I’m in the car—but it’s got a really great chance of going. It’s something that you just let it run no matter what, just because of the stellar cast that’s attached and just the level of talent involved in every aspect—the writing, the acting, the cinematography. It looks like a movie. It’s really fantastic. And I’m so beyond the moon excited and lucky.
Is it almost like playing two people, a little bit?
Yeah. You know what I did? I likened it to that. I believe that originally I had said it’s like being able to play twins, like you have a good twin and an evil twin. But after thinking about it longer and really creating more of a back story for her, I thought that that was the easy way out of putting her against the two parts of herself.
I want to make her more human. It’s a struggle that I think a lot of women have—not necessarily to the extreme of giving up your child or having the husband raise a child—but I think in a family where you have two professionals with the same career, and especially where the woman holds the seat of being No. 1 to the husband’s No. 2, it creates a really interesting dichotomy between the two characters. And she can’t necessarily be an evil mother. People don’t want to watch that. They would lose interest right away and say, “Well, I don’t really like her. I don’t care what happens to her.” You know, “screw it.”
You have to make her human. It’s a struggle for her to not have contact with her child. But also keep in mind the fact that she chooses work over this relationship and her position as mother in this situation. That’s my task, to make you watch Monica and love her for being crazy and out of control and addicted to pills, but also feel for her for not being able to be there for her son and for that family. And not because she’s just busy, but because she actually, she just can’t. She just really can’t, because she doesn’t know how.
But everything she does kind of appalls you almost.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are so many characters like that, especially in Showtime shows. Dexter, for instance, he’s murdering people but you still feel for him and you still care for him and you almost don’t want him to get hurt, you know?
Right. Do you get nervous still meeting people like Don Cheadle?
No. If I’m prepared and I know what to do, then I just go in there and I do my thing. You have a network test before you get hired onto a pilot and we have what’s called a chemistry read where you meet the person and you work out your scenes together and you just see how you two kind of converse and how it goes. I don’t get star struck a lot. I don’t usually try to look up people’s background and what they’ve done and get this feeling of awe from their career because we’re both doing the same thing. I’m here and you’re here and in this situation, in this scene, you’re not someone famous, you’re my ex-husband.
So for me to have that awe, it doesn’t lend itself to the scene or to the relationship between the two characters. So if you let that interfere, then you have a real lack of control over your emotion, especially when you’re at that point of almost getting that job because you just can’t have that.
But I think going in there, I was just really zeroed in on what she was and who he was to me, So Don became Marty to me and therefore, he wasn’t some big star who was in amazing movies and has all these awards. It just wasn’t that. We were two people and we were talking together.
I think that can translate to any situation. If you just think of someone as another person, another human being, we’re all on the same level, you’re not any better than I am. You might know some things and I know some different things, too, and if we can come together and make those things sparkle, then we’re going to have a great situation on our hands.
My character, Monica, in these two scenes, it was written for her to have the power in both scenes. So when I went in there to read with him for the first time, he didn’t give me the power and I was like, “Oh, [bleep], how do I—wait a second.” I was constantly trying to figure out how to pull it from him. This is not something as an actor, especially an actor that hasn’t been doing it for too long, [does]. You’re pretty used to an actor reading what’s there, right? That’s the easy way to do it. But then there’s the way that Don takes it where, “OK, this is what’s supposed to happen, but…”
In order to make that real and believable, you have to start with what’s going on underneath, which is that struggle of pulling the power from each other. Because in real life, as Marty, my ex-husband, [Don] is not just going to give me the power. And if I really deserve the power as Monica, I will take it from you.
So he blocked that taking of the power from me in the first round and when I came back in to do it for the network, I had revised things in my head, ways to pull the rug out from under him in the room so that he couldn’t keep that power from me. I think doing that, he helped me to get this job.
I had to then go in and do what I did and figure out what would help it. I left that room with this huge alligator smile and I was thinking, “Why am I smiling so much?” And I realize that it was because he had kept the power from me. And he was making me take it from him. It was just fascinating. It was a lot of fun; I loved it.
And the pilot is really great?
Yeah, awesome … I’m not actually able to watch dailies for this, but I also don’t really want to. It’s like filming yourself having sex. You know, in theory, it’s kind like—
Some people like that.
I know, some people do … But I just think once you’re looking at yourself doing things that you don’t really want to be conscious of how you look while you’re doing that, i.e.: maybe having sex, then I think it just ruins it because then you worry about how you look. And I’m trying to get away from that. Coming from a modeling background, I really worked hard to get away from that and I think watching myself is not beneficial over time.
You get in your head probably, right?
Yeah, yeah.
This is a dark comedy and we can expect it to kind of follow that Showtime tradition of really funny, appalling stuff, right?
Definitely. And I think they’ll have a lot of fun with Monica. She’s got a lot of morally compromising situations. But at the same time, she gets to be No. 1, so it validates her decision making. It’s just a great character, it’s so much fun. And I know it’s a blast to watch, because even though I didn’t watch the dailies, I’ve heard from other people that watched the dailies that it’s just out of this world.
Who else is in it?
Kristen Bell plays Marty’s coworker, who may possibly lead to a love interest there now that we’re separated. There are some great actors, some really great comedians who come in, even for the guest stars. I am so excited to get to see it, too.
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how can i wait until fall? it's only april 
