March 13, 2006 |
Julia Louis-Dreyfus Has a New Attitude
Get. Out! Seinfeld's Elaine is moving into CBS' cushy Monday-night sitcom neighborhood. In The New Adventures of Old Christine (premiering tonight at 9:30 pm/ET), Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Christine Campbell, a health-club owner juggling single motherhood, an ex-husband (In Good Company's Clark Gregg) who's now dating a younger gal also named Christine (hence our title), and, of course, her own middling love life. Here's what the Emmy winner had to tell TV Guide about her new prime-time gig.
TV Guide: In its ads for The New Adventures of Old Christine, CBS is touting the show as a comedy about "the new American mom." How would you describe it?Julia Louis-Dreyfus: It's a realistic take on being a single working mother, trying to do right by your kid. That's a massive task, and I have nothing but admiration for single moms who undertake the parenting thing on their own. It's hard enough doing it with two people. On this show, it's not just about the haggard single mother but also the haggard single father. Both of them take their son's well-being very seriously.
TV Guide: Your character has to cope with the uptight, overly involved moms at her son's swanky private school. Could you relate?Louis-Dreyfus: I run into those kind of parents everywhere. Maybe I am one. But all of a sudden, parenting is a verb and parenting is a career. Which unleashes a kind of ferocity that is definitely ripe comedically.
TV Guide: On Seinfeld you were the only woman in the cast, and on Christine you live with your son (Trevor Gagnon) and brother (Fantastic Four's Hamish Linklater). What's it like to then go home to your own house full of boys?Louis-Dreyfus: Sometimes that is kind of tiring. There is a lot of testosterone. My days are spent going to ball games now, although I do have a niece, so I can at least have someone to talk laces and bows with.
TV Guide: Did you ever consider returning to TV in a drama instead of a comedy?Louis-Dreyfus: I thought about that, but a one-hour single-camera drama is not what I want to do right now. The hours are very demanding and the truth is, I really like to make people laugh. That would be a tough monkey to get off my back. So it's an advantage but a disadvantage. People laugh even when I don't mean to make people laugh.
TV Guide: Is that why you are jumping back into the sitcom world again? Did you miss having punch lines and an audience?Louis-Dreyfus: Actually, after Seinfeld I was desperate for a break and wanted to be at home all day long. As my kids got older, though, I got the itch to work again. Not to get away from them, but because they're in school and all of that.
TV Guide: Are you still in touch with your former Seinfeld mates?Louis-Dreyfus: We do see each other every once in a while, especially since we've been promoting the Seinfeld DVDs. My path crosses with Jason [Alexander]'s a lot, and with [series cocreator] Larry [David]'s. We always reminisce.
For much more from Julia Louis-Dreyfus — including the truth about Christine's real-life inspiration, a tease of the Adventures to come and her take on "the Seinfeld curse" — pick up the new TV Guide. |
Bill Paxton Is Feeling the Love
What's a fella to do when he has Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloe Sevigny and (that's right, and) Ginnifer Goodwin for wives (other than invest in Hallmark stock, that is)? Big-screen star Bill Paxton talks with TV Guide about getting some real action as a Viagra-popping polygamist in HBO's new dramedy Big Love (Sundays at 10 pm/ET).
TV Guide: You're a big-screen actor with a solid career who's never done a TV series. Why make the exception for Big Love? Bill Paxton: What I saw right away was that this was a brilliant way to take an alternative lifestyle as far out there as polygamy and use it as a prism to examine contemporary society and mores.
TV Guide: How apt is the media description of Big Love as Desperate Housewives in Utah? Paxton: Like the idea that they are desperate and housewives? [Big Love] is the antithesis. This is naturalistic. We're playing these characters dead earnest. The situation creates the comedy. It's like Tony Soprano, a fortysomething guy trying to juggle marriage, fatherhood and a business. In this, I'm playing a guy who is trying to balance marriage, family and his business — times three.
TV Guide: Did anything in your research explain the upside of plural marriage? Paxton: One positive aspect I've read about is the idea of sister-wives. A lot of housewives are stuck talking to a 5-year-old all day. By the time the husband comes home from work, he's tired from his day and doesn't get that his wife is bored spitless and desperate for adult company. This doesn't happen in a plural marriage. You've got your sister-wives to talk to.
TV Guide: What does your wife think of Big Love? Paxton: My wife really likes it. She said, "I know you love Jeanne's character [Barb, the first wife] the most." I kind of based that relationship on my own marriage. I've been married to my wife, Louise, for as long as I've been married to [Barb]. Jeanne and I also have the same cultural references. She grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma; I grew up in Fort Worth. She's a brunette with brown eyes; my wife has that coloring.
TV Guide: In the show, your character nearly buckles from the stress of making each wife feel equally loved. Are you also careful about how much attention you pay each of your female costars?Paxton: I find I have to be. [Grins] You have to show impartiality to a certain degree — it's like with your children. But don't go there. We're still in our honeymoon period. Not only am I blessed with three lovely, talented actresses, but also I think I have chemistry with all three of them, which is not something you can necessarily act.
TV Guide: You've done some wild stuff on screen, like battling tornadoes in Twister and space monsters in Aliens. Did you ever think you'd end up playing a Viagra-popping polygamist, with all those bedroom love scenes the part demands?Paxton: You've got to understand something about me and my career: I'm a romantic in life philosophy, in how I look at the world, the beauty of nature, of relationships. But I never got to do those roles. In my twenties, I wanted to be in a Splendor in the Grass. Now I guess I'm ready for The Way We Were. But here I am, finally getting to do a great love story — times three.
TV Guide: Before you were married, what was your philosophy when it came to finding female companionship? Paxton: Faint heart never won fair lady. You've got to pursue. I'm an impulsive guy, a guy who has pulled girls over in traffic and said, "Hey, do you want to get a cup of coffee?" I mean, I've been that lonely in my life. Many times. I came to L.A. when I was 18 to work as a set dresser in films. I didn't know anyone. I had no social connections. I know what desperation is when you're trying to meet a girl.
TV Guide: You've been known to work your Texas businessman father's expressions into your roles. Give us a few examples.Paxton: In Weird Science, I say to my brother, "How would you like a nice, greasy pork sandwich served in a dirty ashtray?" These were expressions my father picked up from the '20s, '30s, '40s. And in True Lies, I described Jamie Lee Curtis' breasts as making me "want to stand up and bawl for buttermilk!" [Laughs] The first time I ever heard that expression, I asked my dad, "What does that mean?" |
Five Blades Cut Two from Apprentice
You have to say this about the Gillette Fusion razor: It sure is efficient, swiftly lopping two lawyers from the ranks of NBC's The Apprentice (Mondays at 9 pm/ET), as Stacy Schneider and project manager Jose "Pepi" Diaz got sent packing last week. Did the duo's hell-Brent determination to get the dancing terry-cloth monkey booted basically backfire? TVGuide.com asked the ousted for their input.
TVGuide.com: Pepi, for starters, congrats on an Apprentice first — trying to send someone, Brent, home in the middle of a task.Pepi: [Laughs] You don't know the half of it. It was a true debacle. Apparently the only other time somebody should have fired somebody was when Kwame [Jackson] was leading and he tried to send Omarosa home, but that was because he was the boss on a final task. Since I was only a project manager, I didn't have the authority to fire him.
TVGuide.com: Are both of you with me on this whole Fusion-razor thing? I mean, razors are simply getting too many blades. Where do we stop?Stacy: Yeah, I know. Why not just do 10, right?Pepi: [Laughs] By next year they'll be at 15 blades.
TVGuide.com: Did you think it would be a slam dunk to get Brent fired?Pepi: I never thought it was going to be a slam dunk, just because he is very, very unpredictable and Donald Trump himself is very unpredictable. I never thought I was going to get fired because although a lot of things went wrong, I thought I maintained my composure and I thought I had done a good job.Stacy: [Long pause] Did I think it was going to be a slam dunk getting Brent fired? Um... well, I thought it would be obvious that all his antics would finally pile up and he would be out. Like, enough is enough.
TVGuide.com: In retrospect, was too much made of Brent's "altercation" with Stacy?Pepi: Obviously you can't see everything that happened, but most of the boardroom [discussion] was about Brent in different capacities, not just that one scenario. To say that 99 percent of what he did wasn't even shown is saying a lot. You can still tell the guy's a disaster.Stacy: Oh, yeah, way too much was made out of it. It happened, it was unpleasant at the time, but it passed and we all continued working. All of us except for Brent, that is. Brent was dancing; we were working.
TVGuide.com: I had to laugh, Stacy, when Trump pointed out that as a criminal-defense attorney, surely you've had similar run-ins. Is he OK equating Brent with a felon?Stacy: [Laughs] Being a criminal-defense attorney, I've found myself in a lot of unusual situations. But in all my years on television and in court, I never saw anything like that.
TVGuide.com: In your travels, what's the scariest thing you've laid witness to? Other than Brent dancing in a bathrobe.Stacy: I've had reactive clients who were coming out of drug-induced states and had inappropriate reactions in court. But Brent was just all-around inappropriate.
TVGuide.com: Pepi, if you had it to do again, what would you have done differently as a project manager?Pepi: I'd definitely make sure that somebody else was project manager because that task was doomed — destined for failure. [Laughs]
TVGuide.com: Pepi, your NBC.com bio says one of your favorite books is How to Win Friends and Influence People. Did you get the chance to recommend it to Brent before you left?Pepi: Brent has no self-awareness, so he actually sees himself as a friendly person and that his biggest skill is that people love him, which couldn't be farther from the truth. He really does ostracize people and make them feel uncomfortable around him, especially the women. He winds up fighting with women more than he does with men, which is kind of strange.
TVGuide.com: What's next for each of you?Stacy: I just wrote a legal guidebook for women on how to handle their own divorce, and that should be coming out this year. I'm also continuing with my legal commentary on Court TV and CNN.Pepi: I'm back at my law firm in Florida, doing my thing, bringing in new clients. I'm also starting a webpage where Cuban Americans can communicate with each other and find the best companies to work for.
TVGuide.com: You know, I have to wonder... Brent is going to go ahead and win this whole thing, isn't he?Pepi: That'd be amazing, right? |
Law & Order's Vance Is Guilty... of Love
Most actors would kill for a regular role on a series — particularly any piece of the criminally successful Law & Order franchise. But initially, Courtney B. Vance was skeptical when L&O creator Dick Wolf offered him the part of Assistant District Attorney Ron Carver on Law & Order: Criminal Intent (on NBC, Sundays at 9 pm/ET) back in 2001. Not only was Vance reluctant to tie himself down to one project, he didn't like the idea of leaving his wife, Angela Bassett, back in Los Angeles while he shot the show in New York City. Eventually Vance signed on, and this past January, L&O: CI reached a major milestone: 100 episodes. The residuals alone could put a kid through college, which is a good thing considering Vance and Bassett welcomed twins via a surrogate seven weeks ago.
TVGuide.com: First off, how the hell do you do it all?Courtney B. Vance: [Laughs] I honestly don't know. I've got baby brain, I'm jet-lagged, and I don't know when I'll get my rest today because we're doing a rebuild on our garage and I'm dealing with contractors.
TVGuide.com: It must be tough balancing your professional and personal lives. Vance: Taking the role [of Carver] was a major family decision. Angela and I live in L.A. so I knew I would be flying back and forth across the country a lot since we don't go longer than three weeks without seeing each other. And we're always on the phone, every night and a couple of times a day, touching base.
TVGuide.com: Aww, you guys sound like newlyweds! Didn't you two meet back when you both attended the Yale School of Drama? Vance: We knew of each other then, but I was coming in as she was going out. After school [in the late '80s] we were in contact because we were both doing August Wilson plays on Broadway. She was in Joe Turner's Come and Gone and I was in Fences.
TVGuide.com: Is that when you hooked up? Vance: We went on one date around that time but it didn't work out because we were both intensely shy. We got together years later in Los Angeles.
TVGuide.com: Although you've done plenty of guest appearances and TV-movies, CI is your first regular small-screen gig. Were you reluctant to join a series? Vance: A series is a whole thing. All of a sudden you're a "TV actor," and I'd been doing films. So it had to be a project I really wanted to do. I had done a couple of episodes [of the original L&O], so we go back, the show and I.
TVGuide.com: Didn't you play that Wall Street trader who killed his boss? Vance: Yup. The episode was called "Rage."
TVGuide.com: That one was classic! How did Wolf ultimately convince you to join CI? Vance: He just said it would be something that we would all be pretty proud of — and here we are five years later. It's been a wonderful ride. The people working on the show are really extraordinary.
TVGuide.com: Speaking of the people on the show, what was it like getting two news ones — Chris Noth and Annabella Sciorra — earlier this season? Vance: Doing a one-hour series is a lot of work — it's like making a little film every eight days. And it's not like you do one episode and then start another. You're prepping the second one while you're filming the first. It was four years before Chris and Annabella came on to give Kathryn [Erbe] and Vincent [D'Onofrio] a break. It was grueling for those two, because they were in just about every scene. Now they've got a few days off to actually breathe and then come back rejuvenated. It has worked out really, really well. Chris has a wonderful energy. He likes to have fun and joke around. He and Annabella love each other, too. The seamlessness of the transition [between the two sets of leads] speaks right to the genius of Dick Wolf.
TVGuide.com: Got any dirt on Olivia d'Abo's devious recurring character, Nicole Wallace? Will she be back any time soon? Vance: Honestly, I don't know anything and I don't want to know until I've opened a script. I've got plenty of other stuff to do.
TVGuide.com: You started your career in theater and earned two Tony nominations for your work on Broadway. Is there a return to the stage in your future? Vance: Actually, my wife and I did a play together last summer at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis called His Girl Friday, adapted from the movie [of the same name]. It was an incredible romp filled with physical comedy. Angela was a force of nature. We'd never worked together before — we were both in the movie Panther but didn't have any scenes together. It was an amazing opportunity and the perfect environment for us to get our feet wet. She hadn't been on stage since she did Macbeth with Alec Baldwin at the Public Theater [in New York] about five years ago, and I hadn't done theater since Six Degrees of Separation at Lincoln Center [in 1990]. It was magical for me to actually watch Angela acting and think, "Wait a minute, I'm on stage with her, and we're doing this together, and that's my wife!"
TVGuide.com: You guys did that show at the right time. Now that you're parents, you'll never have a spare moment again. Vance: That may be true, but we'll take the kids any day. We'd been trying for a number of years to have children and the fact that we got two, a boy and a girl... well, not only are we ecstatic, but our entire families — especially our mothers — are over the moon.
What's the real reason viewers love crime shows like Law & Order: Criminal Intent? Get a clue. |
SNL Vet Weighs In on the New Buzz
Despite seeing presidential hopeful John Kerry (and thus his portrayal) get snubbed in 2004, Seth Meyers has never stopped being a major part of the mix at NBC's Saturday Night Live (Saturdays, duh, at 11:30 pm/ET). As he prepped for this weekend's show, Meyers — now best known for his bits as haranguing hubby Dan Needler and the Appalachian Emergency Room receptionist, as well as for his impressions of Hugh Grant, Sean Penn and Anderson Cooper — found a few minutes to talk to TVGuide.com about SNL's plans for guest host Matt Dillon, the "real" Natalie Portman and the crazy-delicious digital-shorts craze. TVGuide.com: Seth, how are ya?!Seth Meyers: Good. Sorry I missed you at [the original interview time]. I got called into a meeting.
TVGuide.com: No prob. From what I understand, after all, today [Tuesday] is writing day?Meyers: Tuesday is writing day and because Matt Dillon was at the Oscars, we had to sort of roll Monday and Tuesday all into one.
TVGuide.com: Five seasons into SNL, has anything about the show become easier for you? What's harder?Meyers: I don't think it ever gets easier. You just get more used to how hard it is. I'm never surprised at how hard it is.
TVGuide.com: Flashing back a few years, I have to ask: Was it a gut-punch when John Kerry didn't win the presidential election? Did people not realize that a vote for Bush was a vote against your airtime?Meyers: It was really rough for me. I'm just happy that we took my home state of New Hampshire, which often goes [Republican]. My fellow New Hampshirites came through.
TVGuide.com: Do you secretly wish that Anderson Cooper would screw up more?Meyers: [Laughs] I'm pretty happy with Anderson Cooper right now, he's staying in the news. He just needs another hurricane.
TVGuide.com: When you land a "hit" with something like "The Needlers," are you like, "Cool, at least I'll have a sketch every other week"? I love those two.Meyers: There's a writer named Liz Cackowski whom I've known for a long time, and she and I from the beginning enjoyed that idea. We feel like we know couples like that. I like "The Needlers" [sketches] because there are a lot of jokes in them, and that keeps it fresh. You have to come up with 10 unique ways to put down someone you're married to. [Laughs] It's one of the pieces that gets better as the week goes on, too, because you keep coming up with better than what you have.
TVGuide.com: Give me an example of something you pitched for the Matt Dillon show.Meyers: I was pitching that maybe on the way home from the Oscars, the limousine carrying all the black members of Crash crashed with the limousine carrying all the white members. [It didn't make the cut.] That's a much better pitch than it is a sketch! [Laughs]
TVGuide.com: Come writing day, when does everyone get started? How do y'all fuel up — Red Bull and Cheetos?Meyers: Everybody pretends to get started around 3 o'clock, but you can tell that all everybody's doing is waiting for dinner. Dinner comes around 6:30, and then around 7:30 you realize you're just staring the rest of the night in the eye. So then you... go and get a coffee. Eventually people get down to it.
TVGuide.com: And the show is typically "done" by 9 am Wednesday?Meyers: Yeah, it seems to get later every year. By Wednesday at noon, the first pass at everything is written.
TVGuide.com: What was the most recent "brutal kill" for you? The last sketch of yours that you really liked but got cut?Meyers: That's a very good question.... It's going to take me some time to think about it because I go to a hypnotist every Wednesday who makes me forget all my failures. [Laughs] To be honest, I haven't had any brutal kills this year.
TVGuide.com: And when something is killed, does it stay dead, or can you try to "resell" it another week?Meyers: Oftentimes you'll have a really funny idea and it just doesn't quite fit with the host. And then people will suggest, "You know what, that's a perfect piece for host X," and then things get another life.
TVGuide.com: That was my next question, about the hosts. Is it SNL nirvana when you get someone so obviously gung-ho for anything, like Natalie Portman?Meyers: She brought an incredible energy, and from the early looks of Matt Dillon, it's going to be much the same. He seemed to have a lot of energy in the meeting, and that makes all the difference in the world. People need to understand that part of the show is making a fool of yourself. It's really hard to look cool and also be funny.
TVGuide.com: Natalie's expletive-filled rap video was so fun on so many levels. Part of me suspects that a part of her really wants to be that way.Meyers: You heard it here first: She's actually like she is in the rap video all the time.
TVGuide.com: Oh, don't tell me that. We love Princess Amidala. Meyers: It's true.
TVGuide.com: SNL's digital shorts, beginning with "Lazy Sunday," have gotten the show a ton of fresh buzz this season.Meyers: It's awesome. For a show that's been around for so long, it's exciting to be doing something superfresh and superyoung.
TVGuide.com: Are more and more digital-short concepts getting pitched each week, or is the show wary of Millionaire-ing the idea to death?Meyers: It is absolutely something you have to be very careful of, because it still is Saturday Night Live, and you have to remember that it's the only show on TV doing live sketch comedy. You don't want to get too far away from that.
TVGuide.com: In last week's juice-bar sketch, you and Natalie nearly broke out with a case of the giggles. And once again, Horatio Sanz was present. He's the fly in the ointment, isn't he?Meyers: Well, on a purely basic level, Horatio is the most infectiously funny person I know. So oftentimes if you're stuck out there waiting for Horatio to say his line, that's when you're very, very likely to go.
TVGuide.com: When you "break" like that, how do you snap out of it? Do you think sad thoughts, like, "Kevin Federline and Shar never really got their shot at happiness"?Meyers: You know, it's really hard, because it's moving very quickly. Of course, when you say to yourself, "Don't laugh," laughing is going to be the only thought in your head at that point.
TVGuide.com: Let's finish up talking about the films you have in queue. First, American Dreamz.Meyers: That's coming out in, like, late April. I'm really excited to see it myself. It's a satire about the president and American Idol and terrorism. I don't think a lot of people are trying to do movies about that, so I'm pretty excited about it.
TVGuide.com: Yes, too many movies overlook the obvious ties between the president, American Idol and terrorism.Meyers: It takes a long time to make a movie, so you have to find something that's going to be consistent for a two-year cycle, and the things that are most consistent these days are our president, American Idol and the threat of terrorism. [Laughs]
TVGuide.com: And Key Party — you're writing that one?Meyers: Yeah, I'm writing that right now. We wrote a sketch called "Key Party" [for SNL] with Colin Farrell, and that just struck me as a really funny idea, that whole world of people who swing.
TVGuide.com: I have to laugh because I recently was told that there is a supersecret enclave of swinging, wife-swapping, key-party-throwing couples in my quaint little New Jersey neighborhood.Meyers: See! Everybody keeps telling me that key parties are just something from the 70s, but we've had many people tell us that key parties are still happening, in New Jersey or upstate New York.
TVGuide.com: Well, to anyone reading this, here is your warning: My key chain has a Swiss Army knife on it. |
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