Would you invite Pete Campbell into your home? Maybe a better question is: Could you keep him out? While you think about that, consider the man behind the mask, Vincent Kartheiser, who breathed life into one of Mad Men’s most indelible characters. He has been honing his craft since childhood, in films including Masterminds, Alaska and The Indian In the Cupboard, and later in Another Day In Paradise and Crime and Punishment in Suburbia, for which he received critical acclaim. Kartheiser is also familiar to fans of the WB television series Angel. When Editor-at-Large Tracey Smith sat down with him, she was wondering what all Mad Men fans do: How much of what we see on screen is Vinnie and how much is Pete? So, naturally, she asked…

EDGE: Peter Campbell is manipulative, maniacal, devious, shrewd and success-driven. Is there a little bit of Pete in Vincent Kartheiser?

VK: Is it me? No. But is there a little bit of Peter in Vincent? Yes. I think that if we did a really thorough search and investigation of our history, we would find that we all have those personality traits, either momentarily or in the long term. So, yes, there’s a part of Peter in me. I’m capable of things that aren’t great.

Courtesy of AMC

EDGE: Why do you think Matt Weiner cast you as Pete?

VK: I would like to believe that I fit his vision, that he was looking for somebody who had a certain amount of cockiness and confidence and sliminess, but didn’t really know he had the sliminess. I don’t necessarily have any of those things in real life…but I guess I did in the audition room. (laughs)

EDGE: Thanks, by the way, for doing the fashion shoot for us. Is that fun for you—like a vacation from your everyday wardrobe?

VK: Sometimes. We generally schedule those sorts of things on the weekend. If I’ve had a big week of work, sometimes I have lower energy for such events. And lots of times they put me in stuff that I would never understand how to wear, or hope to wear.

EDGE: On Mad Men, which era of fashion is closer to your taste?

VK: I don’t know. I can’t pull off loud outfits. It doesn’t suit me and I don’t have a great physique, so those really tight pants and those form-fitting shirts aren’t as great as a suit that covers up and makes everyone look relatively similar.

EDGE: You looked great in the Bespoke Couture. Will we be seeing the Vincent Kartheiser collection someday?

VK: No. No we won’t. I know nothing about fashion, nor do I really aspire to. That being said, you know Photoshop is one helluva thing and I’m sure it was utilized. I’m sure a lot of Photoshop is done on my photos!

EDGE: When Season One of Mad Men started shooting, how did you see your character evolving over the years?

VK: You try not to think too far ahead when you’re acting. I do try to think of the past and the present of the character. A character has dreams and hopes and fears, and I do access those, but I tried not to put too many of my own kind of desires into Pete’s character. I didn’t want to put that pressure on myself. I knew what the character wanted in the first season; he wanted to be Don Draper and he wanted to switch out of accounts and be a creative guy. That was something he thought he was more suited to, something that was exciting. I focused on that and I never made too many assumptions of where he’d end up plot-wise.

EDGE: Is Pete Campbell the first character you’ve played that has had to age significantly? 

VK: Yeah, because most of the time you play characters—or at least I’ve always played characters—where the timeframe for the experience is very short. It’s one week, or one year, or one day. Very few stories span ten, twenty, thirty years. In the case of Pete, I aged as well, so it worked out.

EDGE: Is there anything about 30-something Peter Campbell you like better than 20-something Peter Campbell?

VK: There are quite a few things about Peter Campbell that have changed, and I admire them. I think he fits his place in the world and his place in the office. He understands what his role is, what his limitations are, and what his fortés are. In those ways, it makes him an easier person to be around for other people. When a character or a person is always trying to change, or fit a mold that isn’t quite right for them, it’s uncomfortable—not only for them, but for everyone around them. It causes a lot of conflict. So I think it’s wonderful that he’s come to peace with his role in the world, which is to be an account man. At least that’s where he’s settled in. I think his envy and jealousy of people around him has simmered down a bit. He doesn’t need to hate as many people as he used to, which I think is partly due to aging. We all experience that. Because it was such a prominent part of his personality, it’s nice that it’s gone away. He still gets frustrated very easily and feels that nothing ever goes his way, that he’s always getting the short end of the stick, and has a “woe is me” outlook on life—and he still has a sense of entitlement. So not everything has changed. But he has calmed down a bit and stops trying to set fire to everybody around him.

EDGE: What is the value of a Pete Campbell to an ad agency?

VK: I think his value is obvious. He’s a good account man, he works hard, he has ambition, he has loyalty to the people around him and to the company, he’s not afraid to get his hands dirty—he’s not afraid to get his name dirty—and he’s not afraid to use everything in his arsenal to get the job done. He used the death of his father to get an account, he convinced Joan to spend the night with Herb Bennet to land Jaguar, and he is willing to go pretty far into a moral shadow. I don’t think it’s good for the world, but it does bring value to the agency. Actually, I have a hard time calling those things “value” because they’re unscrupulous. Unfortunately, that’s a part of the business world. I don’t think that all companies run their businesses that way, but some certainly do, and in those businesses there are people like Pete Campbell that drive the train, and it accomplishes something.

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EDGE: What’s it like playing a character that many viewers love to hate?

VK: I’m just the actor. The people who really created this character and did the work are the writers. In that writer’s room, we have people who have been agents, who have been advertisers. We have people who are still in advertising who consult, and we have a team of people who spend hours and hours doing research on the time, on the year, on the date, on products, on ad campaigns, on the types of people and the types of stories. Matthew Weiner and the writing team take all of this info and create these characters. I think it’s an honor that I haven’t ruined what they are trying to do—but it’s really that I’m just a vessel, and they really are owed the credit. By the way, you’re right. I get this all the time, people come up and say, “I work with a Pete Campbell.” They did a really good job of writing him in a realistic way, but still in a melodramatic way.

EDGE: Looking back, would you have written your character any differently?

VK: I wouldn’t have written anything differently. I’m very happy with everything they’ve given me. I’m honored that they’ve written what they’ve written. I don’t really live in a world of what-ifs. It gets too complicated.

EDGE: Pete says to Don Draper in an early episode, “A man like you, I’d follow into combat blindfolded.” Would you, Vincent, follow Jon Hamm into battle blindfolded?

VK: Well I wouldn’t follow anyone into battle. (laughs) I do feel he has my back. I think I can speak for all the actors that Jon is so supportive and is so consistent, he’s always giving 100 percent, he’s always present, he’s always good. I have off-days—there are days I can’t remember my lines or I’m struggling. Jon and many of the actors I work with are so, so strong. Jon is there so much and it’s Don’s story, so it is pivotal that he supplies his presence. Yet he does it almost effortlessly and I don’t know how. It’s a character trait that I admire greatly.

EDGE: There’s a lot of smoking and drinking on Mad Men, which is period-appropriate. But what are we to make of Pete’s food choices?

VK: He’s always eating childish food, like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Cap’n Crunch. I think Matthew is making a statement about this boy-man that Pete is—which is something that I can relate to. There’s something about being an actor, especially from when you’re very young. I’ve never had another job, I’ve had a very blessed life, I haven’t had to roughen up my hands too much. I think there’s something about being an actor, particularly though, that keeps you a little bit childish. It’s make-believe, it’s imagination, and I might be guilty of being a boy-man in some ways.

EDGE: I know you’re a fan of Jack Kerouac. He wrote that “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” Who are Peter Campbell’s people?

VK: The man who never grew old enough to understand what he wrote! I think you start yawning when you hit a certain age and Jack never got to that age. Who are Pete’s kinds of people? New Yorkers. Not the “new” New Yorkers, not the hippies that are taking over the Village in the late 60’s, or the drug dealers in the boroughs or any of those sorts of things, but the “old” New Yorkers. I would say his kinds of people are the logical ones, the ones that he can understand why they do what they do. They don’t get off-course, they stay the course. I think that statement by Jack Kerouac, he’s really just talking about himself. He’s saying the kinds of people I like are like me. So, the kinds of people that Pete Campbell likes—if we’re using that template—are the kinds of people like Pete.

Photo by Michael Yarish courtesy of AMC

EDGE: And who are Vincent’s kind of people?

VK: Personally, as Vincent, I like quiet people…and I wish I were one. (laughs) I like people who think about what they say before they say it. I wish I were one of them, too!  I like kind people, gentle people, people who aren’t out for number-one, people who are out for everyone—people who don’t jump to judgment but try to empathize. I’m not really any of those things, and I’m not talking about some crazy-eyed cult. I’m just talking about someone that is real, someone who really sees that their needs aren’t the needs of everyone. That their life isn’t any more important than anyone’s. I don’t know, maybe there’s no one like that in the world, but I feel like I meet them all the time.

Editor’s Note: The only question Vincent Kartheiser dodged in this interview was about his girlfriend, Alexis (Gilmore Girls) Bledel. Now we know why. Vincent and Alex tied the knot over the summer in a secret ceremony. Log onto edgemagonline.com to read more about Vincent’s other television and film roles, and how he kept the EDGE crew loose on his fashion shoot.

When Todd Bowles was throwing passes to his buddies in pick-up football games in Elizabeth, the Meadowlands and the NFL seemed light-years away. The actual distance is only 15 miles, of course. However, to get to East Rutherford as the newly minted head coach of the Jets, Bowles detoured through Philadelphia, Washington, San Francisco, Washington again, Louisiana, Green Bay, Atlanta, New Jersey (he was the Jets’ secondary coach for a year in 2000), Cleveland, Dallas, Miami (where he was interim coach for three games in 2011), Philadelphia again, and Arizona. Along the way he earned a reputation for building creative and unpredictable defenses. Zack Burgess connected with Coach Bowles at the beginning of training camp, and talked about the various stops on the decades-long journey that ultimately brought him home.

EDGE: What attracted you to football as a kid?

TB: It’s all about the camaraderie. Growing up, you play with all of your friends. It’s just something that you get used to doing, just playing outside.

When I was growing up it was just a part of everyday life. You played football and you had fun. When it was time to go out for the teams, you didn’t really have too much pressure, because you were already playing every day with the guys that were going to be on your team. Every weekend we played, and you kind of crafted your skill that way.

EDGE: You were the quarterback.

TB: Yes, I was the streetball quarterback.

EDGE: Who were your football mentors and heroes growing up in Elizabeth?

TB: I didn’t have a true mentor as far as going to camps and everything. You kind of did everything on your own. We grew up playing a lot of street football. It was about 20, 30 kids that I grew up with. You looked up to the guys that were one, two, three years older than you. My brothers, they both were older than me. Just watching what they did and hanging out with them taught me a lot about the game.

EDGE: Don Somma coached you at Elizabeth High School.

TB: He did a heck of a job. We were just developing the team and the program when I was there. The year after I left, they went all the way and won the states. I played tailback, tight end, wide receiver, corner, safety—I don’t think I ever came off the field. We had some good athletes on our team.

EDGE: You played under Bruce Arians at Temple. Was he pretty much the same guy then as he was when you were on his NFL coaching staff with the Arizona Cardinals?

TB: He was a lot more fiery at Temple. He was a young coach, just 30 years old when he got the job. But for the most part, he was always the same guy. He taught boys how to be men. You could always trust him.

EDGE: How good was the Owls defense your junior year? The team was in every game that season.

TB: Defensively, we were pretty good the whole time I was there. We had some very good defensive players in Anthony Young and Kevin Ross. We just couldn’t get over the hump. We played tough schedules back then. It seemed as if almost everyone we played was in the Top 25. There was some good competition back then. We fought pretty hard.

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EDGE: You joined the Washington Redskins in 1986 and became a starter in your second year—the same year that team won the Super Bowl. At what point in the 1987 season did you start thinking, Hey, this is a championship-caliber team?

TB: The Redskins were good when I got there. They had gone to the championship game the year before against the Giants. All season, we talked about who we might be playing in the playoffs. That was our mentality going in with Coach [Joe] Gibbs. Everybody practiced and played that way. You carried your own weight whether we won 43-0 or not. If you didn’t play well, you weren’t going to be playing that next week.

EDGE: You won a lot of tough, close games that season right through the playoffs, then boom you destroy the Broncos in the Super Bowl. What goes through your head as a young player when you are part of a game like that?

TB: It’s something that you can’t even describe. When you get into those types of situations as a young player—going to the Super Bowl—everything moves so fast. It’s one of the happiest moments of your life. But you don’t realize it until five, ten years after it’s gone. You’re so busy having fun, enjoying the moment, that you don’t realize that you’re in it. It was one of the best things to happen to me.

EDGE: What influenced your decision to go into coaching? What did you feel you could teach others?

TB: When I first retired, Emmitt Thomas, who is now in Kansas City and was my defensive backs coach when I played, told me if I wanted to be a good coach that I should get away from the game for at least two years. Otherwise, I would be teaching guys the same way as if I played, and I would be very disappointed. In other words, I would be teaching more from a player’s standpoint rather than a coaching standpoint. So I got out of the game for two years. When I jumped back in, I wanted to learn it from the ground up. So I went into scouting first, with the Green Bay Packers. Then I went to college to see if I liked coaching. And I did. I enjoyed teaching young guys, the X’s and O’s part of it, and that really got me heavy into coaching.

EDGE: Which coaches really opened your eyes to what a head coach in the NFL had to do to be successful?

TB: It was a little bit of everybody. I think Doug Williams started it. Coaching with him in college at Morehouse and then at Grambling—seeing the things he went through and dealt with, and seeing how he treated people—that started me off right. Obviously, Coach Gibbs, playing in that system for him for years and seeing how he conducted things. He taught you how to be a professional. And Coach [Bill] Parcells really taught me how to see the whole game from an organizational standpoint and from a coaching standpoint. Coach Arians, as a player in college and later coaching with him in Cleveland and Arizona, I saw how he respected people and got the most out of his players, especially the second- and third-level players. Coach [Andy] Reid, the year I was in Philly with the Eagles, I probably learned more from a humility standpoint—with the passing of his son and all the things that were going on there—just seeing the difficult things he went through and never letting it affect his coaching. He stood in the face of adversity and he was the same guy every day. That taught me a lot. Wade Phillips for a year in Dallas, he taught me how to have fun with the game, be yourself and just go with the flow. I had a whole bunch of guys who have affected how I look at the game. I haven’t even named them all.

Courtesy of the New York Jets

EDGE: In what ways do NFL teams function as families?

TB: You have to learn to work together. You have to sacrifice and put all your egos to the side. You’re going to be in a building 8 to 16 hours a day, every day, with all these people—especially coaches, who work year ’round. For players it’s half the year. So you get to know these guys on a personal level and what makes them tick. They see what makes you tick. You kind of figure out what buttons to push; they figure out what they can and can’t do with you. There are a lot of personal relationships that go on behind the scenes that everybody doesn’t see. And you put out fires just like any other family. There are spats here and there, but for the most part we’re around each other so much, we kind of get a good feel for each other. And whether you like it or not, you’re going to be a part of a family. You have your bad people and good people—and everything in between. But at the end of the day, we have to be on one working relationship.

EDGE: What are some of the do’s and don’t’s for an NFL coach taking over a new team?

TB: Don’t try to do more than you can. Keep it about football and don’t let the outside stuff bother you.

EDGE: When we watch the Jets this year, what should we be looking for that tells us This is a Todd Bowles team?

TB: Hopefully, as this thing develops, we want to be a smart, tough team. We want to be very physical and we want to be very good at handling game situations.

EDGE: How great is it to be home again—more pressure, or more relaxed?

TB: It’s more relaxed. As a kid growing up, you don’t see the outside world. You don’t travel very much being from Elizabeth. But growing up over the years and coming back to things you haven’t seen in a long time, that’s great. It’s great to be back.

Editor’s Note: As the NFL season gets underway, Zack Burgess is completing his most ambitious sports project to date: a series of 32 books for young readers, one on each pro football team. His work for EDGE has included interviews with a wide range of non-sports celebrities, including Jaclyn Smith, Gloria Gaynor, Danica McKellar, and Beth Ostrosky Stern—all available on edgemagonline.com. More of Zack’s sports interviews can be found at zackburgess.com.

Earlier this year, fans of the New Jersey-based HBO series Boardwalk Empire were surprised to learn that it would be shortened from its initially proposed run of seven seasons to five. Editor at Large Tracey Smith, who interviewed series creator Terence Winter for EDGE in 2013, doubled back this fall to get his take on the Nucky Thompson experience, find out what¹s coming next, and talk a bit more about what keeps his creative juices flowing.

EDGE: Shortening this series to five seasons was a big decision. How did that conversation go between you and fellow executive producer Howard Korder?

TW: Somewhere around the middle of Season 4, Howard and I looked at each other and said, “I get the feeling that we’re kind of headed toward a conclusion here.” It was completely inadvertent in our storytelling, but we felt like if we were listening to Nucky and what he was saying and where he was taking us, that he was trying desperately to get out of this business and to wind down.  The more we talked about it, the more we said, “Yeah, we don’t have a whole lot more to explore with this character.”  We didn’t want to just milk it, and the last thing we want to do is to become repetitive. We’re lucky enough to not be in a situation where, like network TV, for example, you have to hit a certain amount of episodes in order to become syndicated. That’s not the model over here, and that’s not the model that exists anymore, and creatively it’s not anything I’m comfortable with. We always felt that when this story runs its course that’s when the series ends. We felt like that with Nucky and started to have that conversation with HBO. Creatively, they are incredibly supportive; they said, “Okay, well how much do you think you need?” We felt we needed eight more hours to properly tell this story, and that’s where we ended up.

EDGE: Give me the two highlights that stand out for you personally on this project?

TW: One would be Martin Scorsese becoming involved—getting to work alongside my cinematic hero, who was the reason I got into this business in the first place. I saw Taxi Driver when I was a teenager and I can draw a straight line from Taxi Driver through the rest of my career. That was a movie that made me sit up and take notice of movies as being something other than just something to do on a Saturday afternoon. I walked out of that and thought “Wow, what was that? Who is this guy Martin Scorsese and what else has he done?” When I hung up the phone after Martin Scorsese told me “I’m going to direct this pilot” I almost fell out of my chair. That was just an amazing highlight. Part two? All the rest of it!  Having my own show for the first time, getting to work alongside my dear friend Tim Van Patten, getting to know and become dear friends with Howard Korder, Christine Chambers—who started as my writer’s assistant fourteen years ago and now is one of our writers—that whole experience. Just lump it all together.

Photo by Macall B. Polay/HBO

EDGE: You’re about to fast-forward 40 years with your new project about CBGB. Are you nervous about how fans will receive it?

TW: No. I try to approach things that I write as if I’m an audience member. What would I like to see? The rule of thumb is, if I think it’s interesting, hopefully other people will too. If I think it’s funny, hopefully people will agree. Rock and Roll…1973…New York City. I’m there!! If I had nothing to do with this, if I saw a trailer for this, I would absolutely tune in to it. And then you say that Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger are involved in it, Bobby Cannavale stars in it—you’re going to see the beginnings of punk, disco, hip-hop, see these bands, hear this music, spend time in that crazy rollercoaster world of New York  when the economy was horrible and crime was to the roof. I’d watch it so I’m confident that there are people that are equally interested. Hopefully, I’m right.

EDGE: It’s just one great project after another for you. What’s it like to be Terence Winter?

TW: I feel like any moment I’m going to wake up and it’s 1975 and I’m going to be late for my job at the butcher shop. I couldn’t have written a script for my own life that would have played out better. I am unbelievably blessed, I am unbelievably fortunate and I don’t take that for granted for one second. I look in the mirror every day and just think I am the luckiest guy in the world. And I really am.

EDGE: What was the toughest choice you had to make along the way?

TW: Leaving a promising law career to embark on a writing career was pretty crazy. I left in 1990 after two years to move to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. People thought I was out of my mind.

EDGE: Had you ever written a screenplay?

TW: No. Nor had I ever been to Los Angeles.

EDGE: When you think about your legacy, what comes to mind?

TW: First and foremost, I want to entertain people. At the end of my career, if I’ve succeeded in that, then I think that’s really all I could’ve asked for as an artist. When I look at movies done in the 40’s or 50’s, I think Somebody wrote that—someone reached out across time and made me laugh. I remember reading Tom Jones by Henry Fielding and there’s a passage that made me laugh out loud. I thought, God, this guy reached out from hundreds of years ago and made me laugh, which is pretty amazing considering sensibility has changed so much. It makes me feel good to know that this will live beyond me, and my kids one day will be old enough to watch The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire and get more of an insight into me creatively. That is, in some way, psychologically sort of a denial of death— “It doesn’t matter because my work is going to live on.” It’s funny. David Chase and I laughed about this. In The Sopranos, I wrote a similar line for Christopher, who’d made that movie Cleaver, a ridiculous horror movie. Christopher said to Tony, “Wow, that’s really cool. Hundreds of years from now people are gonna be watching this thing.” It’s the same way I feel about our work. It’s great that the written word survives and goes on forever. It’s so great to be able to do this.

Editor’s Note: Tracey and Terence covered quite a bit of ground in their conversation. To read more about the actors, characters and experiences that came together in five seasons of Boardwalk Empire, log on to edgemagonline.com for exclusive bonus content.

Robert A. Caro has spent nearly four decades chronicling the life of Lyndon B. Johnson, tracing his roots from a Texas farmhouse all the way to the White House. Through his biographies of Johnson and Robert Moses, Caro has illuminated the American political process and how power is wielded within our government. He is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, and has won numerous other awards and accolades throughout his career. To EDGE interviewer Jesse Caro, he is something more than that: Caro is his grandfather (aka “Bop”). A recent college graduate embarking on a career in journalism, Jesse wielded his own political power to arrange a sit-down with the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author. The topic: Caro’s own formative post-graduate experiences in his chosen profession.

EDGE: After graduating from Princeton—where you were the Managing Editor of the Daily Princetonian—you became a reporter. What drew you, early on, to journalism?

RC: That’s a question I’ve been asked before, but I’m not sure I know the answer to that. In the beginning, I liked trying to figure out how things worked, and wanted to explain that to people. When I first went to work for this little paper in New Jersey, I almost immediately narrowed that down to an interest in politics because, it seemed to me, that’s what matters. Almost immediately, I realized the idea of politics I had in college had very little to do with the way politics worked, and that I didn’t know how politics worked. Every day, I was learning something as a reporter. And since I felt like, if power in a democracy ultimately comes from us and the votes we cast, then the better informed people are about the realities of politics—not what we learned in textbooks in high school and college, but the way they really worked—the better informed our votes would be. And presumably the better our country would be. So I almost immediately started to be interested in politics for that reason.

EDGE: How did that lead you into investigative reporting?

RC: Purely by accident. I went to Newsday, and I was the low man on the totem pole. But Newsday was a crusading newspaper.

EDGE: Is that why you wanted to work there?

RC: Yes, that’s I wanted to work there. But I hadn’t done any crusading—I was still low on the paper. They had a managing editor named Alan Hathway, a figure straight out of the 1920’s and The Front Page—rambunctious, freewheeling, crusading. But he really didn’t like the idea of the Ivy League. He had always said he didn’t want anybody from the Ivy League in his city room. While he was on vacation, his assistant, I think as sort of a joke, hired me. Hathway was so mad when he came back, he wouldn’t talk to me. He would walk by my desk without saying a word. But Newsday was doing a terrific thing.

There had been an Air Force base in the middle of Nassau County called Mitchel Field, and the Air Force didn’t need it any more. Real estate developers were coming into to Nassau County and they wanted it.

EDGE: How was Newsday covering the story?

RC: Well, the FAA wanted to give most of the land to real estate developers and keep part of it as a general aviation airport—which means a corporate airport—so all these big companies could have corporate jets and fly into the middle of Nassau County. Newsday was trying to prove that influence was being used by the developers and big corporations on the FAA, but the paper wasn’t having success in doing that. So I was in the city room on a Saturday afternoon and the phone rings. It’s a guy from the FAA. He said, “I know that what you’re doing is right, and if you want to be able to prove it, I’ll let you. Just send someone down here…there’s no one here but me.”

EDGE: So this story fell into your lap.

RC: Yes, totally out of nowhere. It was the weekend of the Newsday picnic, and everybody went except basically me.

EDGE: Did you try to contact anyone?

RC: I called all the editors. Everyone was away; everyone was at this beach. Finally, I get some editor who tells me I’ll have to go myself. Well, I had never done anything like this before. So I drove down and the guy let me in, and he basically pointed me to a couple of file cabinets. He said, “Those are the things you want to look at.” I didn’t go home—I worked all that night and all the next day, and wrote a memo for the editors on what I had found. The Monday morning after this, Alan’s secretary calls early in the morning and says, “Alan wants to see you.” Alan had never said a word to me. All the way driving in I was thinking, I’m going to be fired…I’ve got to keep my head up. When I get to the doorway, I see he’s reading the memo about what I found in the files. He looks up and he says, “I didn’t know someone from Princeton could go through files like this. From now on, you do investigative work.”

EDGE: Is it something you’d wanted to do?

RC: Yes, but you say it like I planned everything out. That’s an exaggeration. I knew that what I wanted to do was politics. What I wanted to do was find out how politics really worked.

EDGE: You’ve told me in the past you worked for a county Democratic organization in New Jersey in the 1950s? Did that experience spur your interest in politics?

RC: It did. I graduated from Princeton in 1957 and got married the day after I graduated. We went on this honeymoon for two months, driving around the country, and got back somewhere around Labor Day. I went to work on a paper in New Jersey that was tied in with the Middlesex County and New Brunswick political machine. It almost sounds funny—their chief political reporter would be given a leave of absence for every election so he could write speeches for the Middlesex County Democratic organization. He had a heart attack, so he couldn’t work for a while. He wanted to make sure he had this speech-writing job when he came back, so he wanted to be replaced as speechwriter by someone who was no threat to him. So who better than this kid from Princeton? That’s why I got the job. There was an election coming up and Joe Takacs was the political boss of the city of New Brunswick—a guy who ruled that city with an iron hand. I really did get a look at politics because he really liked me, and he took me with him everywhere. But then the following thing happened. On election day, he did what I later found out was called “riding the polls.” His regular driver took off, and a police captain was the driver for the day. We drove around in this big black car from polling place to polling place. At each place a police officer—a lieutenant or a captain—would come over to the car and basically say that everything was in order. Then we got to this one place where there was a commotion going on between a group of black people and police officers. This [police officer] came over to the car and said something to the effect of, “We’ve had trouble here, but we’re taking care of it now.” I looked over, and they had brought two paddy wagons, and there was a bunch of policeman herding these neatly dressed men—ties and jackets—and young women none too gently into the paddy wagons. They had been trying to be poll-watchers, to make sure the voting was honest, so they had to be gotten rid of.

EDGE: How long did you stay on after seeing this?

RC: When this happened right in front of me, a number of things got to me. It was the meekness with which they were taking this treatment—as if it was expected and they were resigned to it, and I couldn’t stand it. I knew in that moment that I didn’t want to be in the car; I wanted to be out there with them. So the next time the car stopped I just opened the door and got out. I didn’t know it then, but my interests were coming more and more to politics, and more and more to how politics really work. I wouldn’t say I was interested in investigative journalism—I was interested in understanding how politics really worked. And then this [story] happened at Newsday, and Alan said to me, “From now on, you do investigative work.” With my usual savoir faire in moments like this, I said, “But I don’t know anything about investigative journalism.”

EDGE: I’m sure that’s what he wanted to hear.

RC: Well, he said, “I’ll sit you next to [Robert] Greene,” who was a great investigative reporter, and he taught me a lot. And Alan taught me a lot. I learned a lot of things that a lot of reporters never learned. I know how to go through court papers. I know how to trace land transactions. I learned that all from them. I was getting a lesson every day. I learned things then that have guided me all my life, and the simplest thing is: Turn every page. I was going through some files, and I asked Alan some advice about something, and I’ve never forgotten: He said, “Never assume a damn thing. Turn every page.” That has guided me through my whole life.

EDGE: You mean to be thorough, to make sure you don’t miss anything.

RC: Yes. You don’t assume. You never know what’s going to be on a piece of paper. When you get to the Lyndon Johnson Library, the first two floors are a museum. Then you come around the corner and there is this marble staircase. And here are Lyndon Johnson’s papers…there’s four floors of them. They go back—I keep wanting to measure this—it’s like hundreds of feet. The last time they counted, they said there were forty-four million documents, so you couldn’t possibly turn every page and read every page. You’d have to have many lifetimes to do it. My first book [on Johnson] was going to be almost all on his congressional period. So while there were thousands and thousands of boxes, the number of boxes that had to do with the congressional period was manageable—there were 349 boxes. I thought if I was doing what Alan taught me, I would go through every piece of paper in those boxes. It would probably take about a year and a half or something, but you can do it. And by doing that, I found out all these things that people thought could never be found out. All the biographies—there were already a lot of Johnson biographies when I started—they all sort of knew that Brown & Root, this big Texas contracting firm, had financed him. And everyone said, Well, we can never find out about it because no one would talk about it. But I said, “If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this the same way I was as a reporter—I’m going to turn every page.” And in some file—whatever the file was, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with this—there was this telegram from George Brown, an actual telegram from George Brown to Lyndon Johnson in October, 1940 saying, Lyndon, the checks are on the way.

EDGE: How many years have you spent on Lyndon Johnson now?

RC: I started in 1976.

EDGE: I imagine that immersing yourself in one person’s life for that long must give you incredible insight into who that person is—which is something that I don’t think you could get from being a journalist. Is that something you were seeking, or is that something that just happened based on the nature of your work?

RC: That wasn’t something I was really interested in, in the beginning.

EDGE: Do you feel as though it’s something you have come to appreciate?

RC: If you spend that much time with someone, you feel like you know them. My interest is not telling the life of a great man.

EDGE: It’s in political power?

Robert and Jesse Caro. Never turn your back on grandpa!

RC: Yes, but you immerse yourself, and when Johnson is doing something, you say to yourself, “Well now he’s going to do something.”

EDGE: The way you might with a friend or a close acquaintance?

RC: A really close acquaintance that you’ve spent a lot of time with.

EDGE: Have you found that LBJ’s political life reflected his personal life? Or was Johnson a different person at home than he would have been in the White House or Congress?

RC: Johnson—I can answer quickly—he was the same person.

A year ago last February, fans of the AMC series Breaking Bad tuned in to the most highly anticipated “prequel” in television history, Better Call Saul. The series introduced us to a young(er) Saul Goodman, aka Jimmy McGill, played with great heart and humor by Bob Odenkirk. No surprise there. The eye-opening performance on the new series was delivered by Rhea Seehorn. Seehorn (her first name is pronounced Rey) portrays lawyer Kim Wexler—the object of Jimmy’s affection and one of the most appealing and complex characters on series television. Known for her TV work on the sitcoms I’m With Her, Franklin & Bash and Whitney, along with her many stage roles, Seehorn brings an edgy sophistication to Kim’s role that only a veteran player could. Editor-at-Large Tracey Smith was curious what it feels like when the stars align with a great part, great show, great writers and great directors. Who better to ask than a great actress?    

EDGE: Jimmy McGill is the larger-than-life character who drives Better Call Saul. But it’s Kim who brings out the best and worst in Jimmy—which makes her one of the truly compelling characters on TV right now. Is this the kind of love story an actor can really sink her teeth into?  

RS: It’s a great part. Because the character Kim is independent and the relationship itself serves the story well, she is not an appendage to the lead. She is fully realized as she is. It’s a gift to get to play someone that has layers and layers that keep unpeeling, to play subtext and backstory—and to play things in the middle, where your audience goes on the ride with you instead of your character telling them what to think. It’s great.

EDGE: What are the things you look for that help you play Kim with increasing depth?

RS: On set, everything is meticulously crafted before we receive the script.  Every single thing you need is there to craft your character. The text is everything.  Every clue you need is there.  Once I’m on set, I have the pleasure of letting the rest of it be shaped by my awesome directors and scene partners.

AMC/Sony Pictures Television

EDGE: Kim is the sane, moral center of a story that’s populated by a lot of unhinged and amoral characters. Is it a challenge having to hold it all together in your scenes?

RS: No. Kim is navigating through a world where everybody insists that things are black and white. But Kim is in the middle. [Laughs] If she saw herself that way, my guess is it would be an unbearable burden! I don’t believe Kim sees that dichotomy between her and the others.  If anything, I think the past two seasons have been a continuing exploration of all the gray areas there are in life, and how futile it can be to try to see things as only black and white.  

EDGE: What’s different about playing a character in a prequel? Do you sense that things aren’t going to end well for Kim? Or will she survive and ride off into the sunset?

RS: I have the luxury of playing a character that could end up anywhere, so that distinction does not apply to me. Better Call Saul is a fresh landscape for me.  I don’t sense anything. [Laughs] I honestly don’t know! I think that the writers are smart enough to have not painted themselves into a corner. The story could go anywhere. Anything could happen. I’m not as smart as these writers and saddled with the job of figuring out the best story to tell. 

EDGE: So what can you be certain about where Kim is concerned?

RS: I am 100% certain of one thing only—that Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould, and our whole amazing writing staff will write what is the absolute best story they can. And the characters—mine included—will serve that story.  I have absolute trust that it is equally possible for new characters from Better Call Saul to exist or not exist during and after the Breaking Bad years, and that they will have a meaningful and provocative effect on progressing the story forward either way.

EDGE: Do you wonder—as the audience does—if a new Breaking Bad character is going to suddenly show up?

RS: No, never.  

EDGE: Did you have a “Eureka Moment” as an actress? 

RS: It was much more of an organic thing for me.  I never had one moment where I was sure I was going to be okay in this field. I just worked on whatever role I could get my hands on, and strove to work with great people who would make me better with each project.

EDGE: How do your strengths as a seasoned stage actress help you in your television and film roles?

RS: I’m very thankful for my training, history, and experience with theater. My personal grab bag of techniques and methods—which I’ve picked up from all different people, classes, plays, shows, and projects—is what I have to rely on each time I’m creating a character, preparing a scene, taking direction, doing multiple takes, and attempting to be present for my scene partner, so that each time we tell the story, it’s for the first time. I think that, certainly, there is something to be said for doing a play eight times a week. You learn how to do the same lines over and over, know how to live and breathe them organically as though they are new each time. I find that that helps when you’re on your ninth or tenth take. You’re remembering why you’re new to your character. 

EDGE: Do you collaborate smoothly with directors?

RS: I love directors that love to direct. There is nothing better for me than a character interpretation that you come up with together with other people. I have had so many great directors. I’ve been very, very lucky—stage and on-camera work, just really wonderful directors, including the directors on my show now.  

EDGE: Something we’d see on the screen?

RS: Yes, you have some freedom to single out pauses and breathing in the scene. They allow you to sit in the moment. That comes from everybody involved, Sony, AMC, Vince and Peter, as well as all of our directors. There’s an allowance to really explore scenes a lot. Our directors are wonderful.  

AMC/Sony Pictures Television

EDGE: What were some of the things you learned as an actor from your experience on the sitcom I’m With Her?

RS: It was my first series regular part, and when the show was picked up for a full season, it was the reason I moved to L.A. from New York. There was a huge learning curve, of course. And everyone in the cast and on the crew was incredibly generous in helping me, teaching me, and answering all my questions. Being that it was a multi-cam sitcom, there were many things that were very familiar—the somewhat proscenium-style staging and the live audience, for example.  

EDGE: Robbie Benson directed that series.

RS: He was a lovely, very helpful and supportive director. As were Ted Wass, Shelly Jensen, Arlene Sanford and all of my other directors for those 24 episodes. My cast—Teri Polo, David Sutcliffe, Danny Comden—as well as the creators Chris Henchy and Marco Pennette, and all of the writers and producers, really were the best gift I could have asked for. They were so talented and supportive. I work really hard and I don’t take any of that for granted.

EDGE: How did you land the role of Roxanne on Whitney? Had you crossed paths before with Whitney Cummings?

RS: I was asked to audition for the role and then I got picked. I didn’t know anybody on that show. You know, Whitney’s so funny and such a great woman. A lot of people think she cast a bunch of her friends on that, but she didn’t. She and Chris D’Elia knew each other, but the rest of us had never met.  

EDGE: Is there a common thread to your roles—on stage, on TV, in film…

RS: All the roles I have gotten were roles I had no idea I would get, but I was at my best. The bigger the character is, the more I’d get nervous and think, “What an amazing character. They could have anyone they want.” So I’ll get freaked out, and then I eventually get fatigued of being freaked out, and then just say to myself, “This is a little black box theater production and a three-minute character sketch…let’s just make up somebody that you would love to play…do the scene on a curb as if four people would watch…then just do your best and let go of whether or not you are the right person to tell the story.”

EDGE: Did you always have good comic timing? 

RS: I don’t know [laughs]. Comedy is definitely a science. I coach actors, so I know you can study it. You can have an ear for it or not.  It’s a weird thing to try to teach if someone can’t hear it.  

EDGE: Is there a better degree in comedy than being involved in a Neil Simon play on Broadway?

RS: I was not cast in 45 Seconds from Broadway. I was an understudy that got to go on…and it was thrilling. Julie Lund was cast in the role, and she was just amazing—absolutely beautiful and charming and wonderful in the role. The one and only Jerry Zaks directed. He requires that his understudies be present at all rehearsals and remain in the building, just below the stage, for all performances. 

EDGE: That was during the September 11th attacks.

RS: Yes, we rehearsed up through 9/11, then we took a break. I was living in Brooklyn at the time. We actually went back to work during the time when they were telling everyone to not take the subway and to not go to public gathering areas. We premiered soon after. It was a beautiful thing to see audiences pour in because they needed to escape.  I’m so thankful for that whole experience because not only did I get to watch and listen to Julie craft and perform her wonderful role, I got to listen to and watch some of the greatest theater actors of all time on a daily basis—Louis Zorich, Lewis Stadlen, Bill Moor, Alix Korey, Dennis Creaghan, Judith Blazer, Rebecca Schull, Kevin Carroll, Lynda Gravatt, and two of my favorites, the late, and irreplaceable, Marian Seldes, and David Margulies.

EDGE: Back to Kim and Better Call Saul. You do a great job with a great character on a great series—what are some of the great things that happen as a result of that?

RS: Well, thank you for that. I’m just so grateful to continue getting to do what I love. And, really, to have the incredible fortune of working with people and material that continue to challenge you and make you better…what’s better than that?  

Rare is the actress who doesn’t pad her résumé with a couple of characters that sound a little bigger or more important than they actually are. Choice parts for women—and particularly women of color—are few and far between. By contrast, Regina King can barely keep track of the primo parts she’s snagged since she first starred at age 14 in the sitcom 227. Her film credits include featured roles in Boyz n the Hood, Friday, Jerry Maguire, How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Ray. In 2017, she supplied the voice for Dynamite, the leader of the smokejumpers in the animated film Planes: Fire & Rescue, while Netflix binge-watchers know her as Latrice Butler, the female lead in the new Netflix series Seven Seconds. Gerry Strauss recently caught up with Regina, whose television work includes indelible characters on The Boondocks, 24, Shameless, The Big Bang Theory, The Leftovers and American Crime, for which she has won a pair of Emmys. Based on her shattering performance in the Season 3 finale (spoiler alert!), she can probably start dusting off a spot for a third.  

Columbia Pictures

EDGE: You were only fourteen years old when you played Brenda Jenkins on 227 in 1985. How did you land that role? 

RK: I’d done the play that the show was based on. I did it for about a year, and the creator of that play sold it as a series to NBC. I didn’t play the daughter in the play. I played the girl that lived around the corner. But everyone that was in the play had a chance to audition. That was one of the stipulations that Marla Gibbs made sure that was in there, that everybody got a shot to audition. Beyond that, it was still a regular audition process—as far as the callbacks and coming back in and coming back in and coming back to see more people and more executives. Back then you didn’t have the internet where you could send a video.

EDGE: What was your relationship like with Marla?

RK: She is an amazing woman, and she is definitely someone who influenced my life in such a humongous way. She was a trailblazer in the ’80s. She had a very successful jazz club in L.A. She was on a hit show where she was executive-producing the show, and handling part of the writing on the show. She was doing a lot. I had a role and center seat to all of that. It was impressive. It really made an impact on me. 

EDGE: Okay, so 227 ends and now you’ve been on TV for about five years playing a teenaged daughter on a family sitcom. Was it challenging to transition from the teenage daughter on 227 to other types of roles, to get people to see you in a different light? 

RK: Yeah, yeah, I did go through a little bit of that. But Boyz n the Hood helped break that out. 

EDGE: You worked with John Singleton on some of his other movies, including Higher Learning and Poetic Justice. Was there a chemistry between you? 

RK: Yes, definitely. That’s a very common thing in the industry. People who have a good working relationship and grow together, continuously work together. 

EDGE: You also had tremendous chemistry with Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire playing Marcee, the wife of Rod Tidwell.

RK: We have a great chemistry, Cuba and I. I think no matter what culture or color you are, if you’ve been in a relationship where you have been through highs and lows together—and you’re still best friends—then you understand. You feel Rod and Marcee. No matter what your situation is, if it’s football or running the family business that’s a chain of dry cleaners, whatever it is. If you’ve been through that fire together and still are best friends, anyone that’s experienced that knows the feeling. 

EDGE: Looking back at all of the film and TV projects you’ve done, does it ever surprise you how enduring they’ve become?

RK: No, because everything, when I was working on it, was a big deal to me. Friday [co-starring with Ice Cube] was my fourth movie. Things were starting to go. I got to play a different person from what I did in Boyz n the Hood or 227. It was a big deal for me when it was happening. Then, when I actually saw the movie, the movie is hilarious! It’s a classic. Just me as an audience member seeing it, I thought it was dope, so no, I’m not surprised. There were a lot of people from L.A. that were working on that movie together, people who were already feeling a little bit of their success, so it was a great time for us working on that film. It was a big deal.

EDGE: A lot of people know you for your recurring role as Mrs. Davis, the head of HR in zThe Big Bang Theory. Is it fun for you to go back to your roots and perform in front of a studio audience for laughs? 

RK: That was fun. It’s a nice little departure, especially when you’re hitting drama back to back to back. I was very grateful for them to give me a chance to exercise some different muscles. 

ABC Studios

EDGE: One of your biggest critical successes has been your work for HBO on The Leftovers. It’s such an interesting niche program. Do you think it would have survived or even existed even five or ten years ago?

RK: Forty-five percent of the shows on right now wouldn’t have survived. What would be the show that you would say it was comparable to fifteen years ago? I don’t think there was one. So I guess it goes right in that category with that forty-five percent. I take a lot of pride in being part of a show that’s so unique.

EDGE: American Crime is an amazing show in that it hits the reset button each season to feature brand-new stories and characters. Do you enjoy the process of starting from scratch and entering an entirely new scenario each year?

RK: Yes, yes. I think it’s an actor’s dream. You have the opportunity to do it like a long movie. That’s one of the things that is the beauty of doing a film—you let that character go after you finish. Whereas on the series, you’re doing that same person and trying to find a way to make that person evolve over 20 episodes and multiple seasons. 

EDGE: Does having that definitive one-season story enable you to develop a clearer understanding of your character’s journey? 

RK: We have an idea, but we don’t know because we’re getting the scripts as we go. In the first and second seasons, John Ridley would redact a lot of the scenes for other people. I wouldn’t necessarily know what’s happening, or know the outcome for Felicity Huffman’s character, for instance. That was really helpful because, in real life, that’s how it works. I don’t know the day-to-day things that are going on with someone I just know from a distance. The top priority is always to tell the story. That’s our number-one commitment. 

Glenn Francis, www.PacificProDigital.com

EDGE: After everything you’ve done so far in your career, what’s something that you want to try to do—or maybe revisit—as you look towards the future.?

RK: Actually, I used to own a restaurant. I want to do that again. I was too young when I did it before, so I always say that I’m going to do it again when I grow up! 

Photo by Irvin Rivera

Actors often talk about the challenge of establishing a physical presence in the scenes they play. Not a problem for Omar Miller. If anything, the challenge is for his directors, who must find a way to wedge his 6’6” frame into the shot. From his breakthrough role in the 2002 Eminem film 8 Mile, to his critically acclaimed turn in Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna, to his current co-starring gig with Dwayne Johnson in HBO’s pro football opus Ballers, Miller has turned in one thoughtful, touching performance after another. In a wide-ranging Q&A, Ashleigh Owens ventures into the “O-Zone” to trace his evolution from a baseball star in Anaheim to an acting star in San Jose—to the scene-stealing “gentle giant” he has become today.  

EDGE: The characters you play tend to be gentle and sensitive. Is that something you like to bring to your roles, or is it something directors are looking for when you read for parts? 

OM: You know what? It’s a combination. But really, this is one of those Hollywood pigeonholing things, to a certain degree. Every now and then I get to do something where I get loose and I really enjoy it when I do.  I think that in Hollywood, when they find one of your characteristics or traits that resonates with audiences, they continue to use you in that capacity.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just that you like to show other wrinkles from time to time. So, with me, people seem to love a giant dude that is also very gentle. It’s been an interesting element in my career. 

HBO/Warner Bros. Television Distribution

EDGE: Where does that pigeonholing come from? 

OM: If you watch movies and television, I’m definitely not the pioneer in the “gentle giant” space. It’s just a position that those audiences and creators like. They like the idea of contrast, and when you have a person who is eligible and able to do a lot of physical damage—yet takes extreme care and sensitivity—there’s something interesting about that. 

EDGE: Did you have a particular moment where you said, “Hey maybe I can make a living as an actor?”

OM: Actually, I was still an audience member when I had that light bulb moment.  I was in college at San Jose State watching Homeboys in Outer Space and I was like, Wow. I could do this. I was done playing baseball and was trying to figure out what the next step in my life was going to be. And thank God that I found acting, got into theater, and ran into wonderful professors who helped me hone my abilities and understand what the craft and skill set actually is of performance. Things have really fallen into place. I am blessed. 

EDGE: I know that during my own college career, theater class was something I was able to jump into and I found it to be an enjoyable subject. 

OM: I feel like it’s an exploratory thing—anyone can take a theater class. I know my first theater class was a General Education class, and part of the reason it was offered as a G.E. class is because theater can help you in other areas of your life, no matter what it is. It just makes you more self-aware, able to speak in front of people more comfortably and get your point across. There are a lot of things that theater can teach everybody. 

EDGE: How does it feel to combine your dual passion for acting and athletics?   

OM: It’s cool because both areas are so captivating in society right now. One of the things that I love about being an actor is that it gives you access to so many different worlds. The world of sports is something I know a bunch about. So, when you combine that with the actual performance, it adds a little bit. 

EDGE: Is that something you’ve discussed with your Ballers co-star, Dwayne Johnson? 

OM: No, not really. Those connections are obvious. With his background as a professional football player at one point, doing a show about football has a special place in his heart.  A guy like Dwayne is living such a bizarre life compared to what regular people know about. That’s one of the things that’s great about him—he’s able to keep a level head despite the heights he continues to rise to. 

EDGE: What’s an important take-away from Ballers? 

OM: We’re putting out material that can give people a sneak peek into the world that they’re interested in, but may not actually know much about. I think the show gives a good inference into the world of sports and finance, the excess that can happen, and how easy it is to get caught up in that and lose yourself, your soul, your morals and mind. I love that it entertains people, but also helps them to understand that the people they idolize are real people as well. 

40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks/Touchstone Pictures

EDGE: You played a World War II soldier in Miracle at St. Anna and obviously you didn’t have military experience. How difficult was it for you to convey the terror of warfare—what did you draw on? 

OM: I spoke to one of my uncles, who was a Buffalo Solider and is still alive. I spoke to him about the experience and what it was like to be an American, then to go to Europe at the time, and the different ways you were treated, and then also be literally facing the Nazis. I did a lot of research for that role, and I had to lose 75 pounds. I shot that film at the end of the summer, right after I made a movie called The Express, where I played an offensive lineman who was a very, very big dude. It was drastic—there was a lot that went into getting that role. To date, it’s still my favorite thing I’ve ever done.  

Imagine Entertainment

EDGE: How did Spike Lee get what he wanted from you as an actor?

OM: The beauty about Spike is that he knows what he wants out of making his films. You have the confidence of a veteran to understand what it is that he’s going for, so there’s not a lot of confusion about what he wants from you as an actor. I got along well with Spike because he’s a master at capturing your performance, and as an actor, he makes it very clear that it is your responsibility to craft the performance. What he’s going to do is capture the performance. And I was able to really benefit from his structuring.

EDGE: How did the film impact your life?

OM: It opened me up to my own popularity worldwide. And also to travel. The majority of the film was shot in Italy. And in that respect, a beautiful thing took place. I started to grow. Ever since I made that movie, I’ve gone to Europe once a year, every year. Miracle at St. Anna also opened me up to more opportunity, because Spike selected me for the film. Whenever you’re directly working alongside Spike, and he gives you that stamp of approval for using you, it’s a good feeling. You’ve grown up watching this man and his films and you can definitely see why he’s great at what he does. My favorite film is Mo’ Better Blues. It was a great experience to sit on set and get to talk to him about it. 

EDGE: You also had the opportunity to work with Eminem in 8 Mile and, a couple of years later, 50 Cent in Get Rich or Die Tryin’. How do they compare?

OM: It was like night and day! Both of them were extremely popular. Eminem is very introverted and 50 is very extroverted. 50 is like your friend that won the lotto. Eminem is somebody that isn’t made for that massive attention. 

EDGE: Looking back, if 30-something Omar  could offer 20-something Omar a piece of acting or career advice, what would it be?

OM: Be persistent and make your own stuff. Nowadays, there’s so many different outlets. Someone, somewhere wants to see what you create…but you have to create it for it to be seen. 

: Ashleigh Owens is the daughter of the late Tracey Smith, EDGE’s longtime Editor at Large. Ashleigh’s conversation with Omar Miller also delved into the craft of acting and his love of sports. Log onto EdgeMagOnline.com to read more of their Q&A.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

What a character! When an actress hears those words, they usually refer to the person she’s playing…or the actress herself. For Ming-Na Wen, one needs to be a bit more specific. She slips in and out of her roles with the ease one would expect from a veteran stage and screen performer. Yet, as EDGE writer Gerry Strauss discovered, the perspective, humor and irony she brings to those parts comes from her very core. From her breakthrough performance in The Joy Luck Club to her starring role on ER to breathing life into the voice of Mulan, Ming-Na has consistently surprised audiences with the depth and subtlety of her work. On the hit ABC series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., she has won over fans of the Marvel universe by playing Agent Melinda May brooding, stoic and scary. In other words, totally against character.     

Buena Vista Pictures

EDGE: What qualities did you try to bring to your breakthrough role in The Joy Luck Club?  

MNW: I brought my whole Asian-American experience to the role of June Woo. One of the reasons why I think I was cast for that part was because there’s something inherently difficult about being Asian in America. You tend to feel like people treat you sort of as a foreigner even though you’re American. For me, I had that kind of mixture—having come from China, from Hong Kong, and having had to learn English in America and assimilate—but then, at the same time, having these immigrant parents who really didn’t assimilate as much and sort of staying in their own culture. So that was all about June, feeling like she didn’t quite fit in and having a cultural gap, as well as the age gap with her parents, and feeling inadequate in certain ways. She dealt with it in a more shy way and in a more enclosed way. I, of course, became an actor. That’s the only difference between me and June.

Warner Bros. Television

EDGE: How about your work on ER? 

MNW: Oh, yeah. Well, I brought my “vast” knowledge of medical experience [laughs]. As an Asian, we had to be doctors or lawyers, so I’d already “been” to Harvard, Yale, John Hopkins….in fact, that’s one of the jokes that I would say to my parents: “Hey. You wanted me to be a doctor, so I was a doctor for five years!” [laughs] I think the thing that I brought to Dr. Chen was the fact that she gets a little snarky. She always wanted to prove that she was the best at her job. She was very different from who I was. I’m not snarky, but I’m definitely sarcastic, as you can probably tell.

EDGE: And funny.

MNW: Okay! [laughs]. But for me, her character was definitely someone that I had to create more based on who I thought she was. It came from observations of some of the people that I grew up with, who just feel like they are always having to compete and always having to prove themselves. The really interesting thing about her character, who became pregnant on the show, was that I did become pregnant for real. I guess that’s really kind of a strong connection. The writers and the producers were like, “Oh. I think you just slept your way into a really good storyline.” 

It was really funny because they wanted her screaming and doing all this stuff and I was, like, into holistic birthing and all-natural kind of stuff. So, we shot the scene before I actually gave birth and I thought it was way too overdramatic. After I actually did have my kid—and realized how painful of an experience it really was—I called my director back and I said, “We need to re-shoot all of those scenes. I wasn’t dramatic enough.” That holistic stuff didn’t really work for me.

EDGE: Your first TV series actually was The Single Guy in the late 90s, a sitcom. What was special about playing Trudy in that series for you?

ABC/Kurt Iswarienkio

MNW: Getting that pilot—and the mere fact that I was working with a legend like Ernest Borgnine—that blew me away. It was so fortuitous because I came from theater and, with sitcom, it is theater. It was like putting on a show, a play, every week, which we did in front of a live audience. Trudy was just this great character who was not shy about her opinion and had a lot of attitude—but also a lot of love for her friends and for her husband. So, yeah, she was really fun to play. It was just my cup of tea. I hope to retire with a sitcom.

EDGE: You’ve been a part of so many strong ensemble casts. Is that the environment that you enjoy the most, being a member of a group of talented people who are on equal footing?

MNW: I thrive in that environment. I think any show requires that, unless you’re doing a one-woman show. It appeals to me because of my theater background. The whole idea of being with a group and sharing an experience together in creating something, it’s just so satisfying and so much fun. I guess my karmic energy, or whatever it is, it keeps leading me to that…and I certainly have no desire to do a one-woman show.

EDGE: Let’s talk about Mulan. In hindsight, that iconic role broke a lot of barriers and inspired and empowered girls. Was that a focus for you in providing the voice for that character?

MNW: I knew about the story because she’s a legendary character in China and for me it was about bringing her heart and soul. Mulan came early in my career and I was just so enamored with Disney and the writers and the producers, who put so much research and time in creating her. My stepfather was twenty years older than my mother at the time, so his health was not at its best. All of the stuff that Mulan did for her father and for her family—it just was so true to what I was going through. So for me, I was focused on bringing her heart and her desire to kind of figure out her self-worth.

EDGE: Making sure that it wasn’t just a cartoon character. 

MNW: Right. She was a real young woman trying to figure things out, even though she was rebellious and she was reprimanded for it all the time. Something about her is very, very different than all the other princess stories because she really wasn’t a princess. She kind of became, like, an honorary princess. The emperor kind of endowed her with his blessing. Ultimately, she was just a regular girl trying to live in a society that either accepted her or didn’t accept her, believed in her or didn’t believe in her, and she had to figure it all out. I think that’s why it resonates with so many people. Ultimately, Mulan just followed her heart, which is the beam of the movie. And everything turned out right in the end. That’s kind of my philosophy in life. I’ve always wanted to be an actress. My mother certainly did everything in her power to dissuade me from doing it, but ultimately, I just followed my heart and followed who I was and that’s a great, great inspiring motto for any little boy or girl.

EDGE: Your family owned a restaurant in Pittsburgh. Were you involved from a young age?

MNW: Yeah, very involved. It’s always interesting when you grow up in an environment where you’re basically immersed in your parents’ work. That’s what I did. I would do my homework. I would socialize with the waiters and the cooks and then, as I had free time, my mother taught me about how to be at the cash register, doing take-outs and, then when I was strong enough, how to do waitressing. I did it all. It taught me a lot about business and it taught me a lot about communicating with people—and taking their money.[laughs] No, I’m just kidding.

EDGE: Interacting with such a variety of people every day must have provided you with a lot of character studies for later in life.

MNW: Absolutely. That’s a very good question because on any given day we would have our regular customers come through, as well as some colorful characters. Every day I was bombarded with people! Our cooks, as well as our waiters, all had very distinct, wonderful personalities and I was definitely immersed in an environment where I wasn’t just isolated in a house. Yeah, I definitely think that helped me to always be observing and watching people. And I still love doing that to this day. Living in New York, sometimes I would just grab a cup of coffee and a doughnut—when I used to eat doughnuts—and I would just sit down and watch people walking. You would be amazed at the variety of walks that people have. It was always fun.

ABC/Florian Schneider

EDGE: What do you like about playing Agent May, your character on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D? 

MNW: Whatever transpires, Agent May is very buttoned-down and maintains this incredible wall, hiding behind her mask, so to speak. She’s one of those interesting characters who, with every moment that she’s had, kind of goes back to square one in some way, where she just feels safest by not dealing with emotions. She is able to function in life by just compartmentalizing.  

EDGE: What happens when she tries to open up?

MNW: It never works out. It makes me laugh because the writers know how much I want her to emote more. That’s just the actor in me, how much I want her to be able to share and open up. And they’re just, “Nope. Nope. Less Ming. More May. That’s how we like her.” I think Agent May will still stay very much the “bad-ass” that she is and I think the audience really loves that in her. [laughs] Which is so masochistic. Our fans know it’s all in there, because I do. I feel it all…but then I have to flatten it all up. She is absolutely, out of all the characters I’ve ever done in my life, the absolute opposite of who I am. Completely. You would never see Agent May laughing at a potty joke, for sure.

EDGE: Agent May is a character in the Lego Marvel Super Heroes video game that was released earlier this year. You’ve actually lent your voice to a number of video games. How does that process differ from acting onscreen, or voicing an animated character like Mulan?

MNW: It is the most bizarre session you can ever imagine. I really wish I had video tapes of those sessions, working voices in games. Basically, you don’t know which version they are going to pick. It depends on how the player is playing the game. You basically say “Hi” five different or ten different ways and I’m like, “Hi! Hello. Hey. What’s up?” Also, a lot of it is very, very dramatic. You do weird noises like, “Oh! You’re falling down a cliff!” It’s ultimately very, very bizarre. You do this stuff and after three hours, four hours of it, it’s exhausting and feels silly.You’re feeling kind of stupid about it, but then when you see the game and how it’s put together, you realize that all that variety does help in different situations. 

MNW: I grew up going to the arcade every day after school with my boyfriend and spent a lot of quarters so I just think it’s the coolest thing that I’m in games. It’s so crazy. You’re this little Lego character. It’s amazing. For a geek girl like me, it doesn’t get any better. 

Courtesy of ABC-TV/Channel 7

ABC’s Michelle Charlesworth

Clawing your way to the top of the New York news business is not for the faint of heart. Staying at the top not only takes talent and tenacity, it requires the kind of authenticity that connects with viewers, who trust you to get every story right. And, of course, an occasional bit of luck. Michelle Charlesworth, longtime reporter and anchor for Channel 7, paid her dues on the way to joining the Eyewitness News team in the 1990s. However, it’s what she endured on the job—including a skin cancer scare and near miss on 9–11—that helped endear her to fans and define her as both a person and a professional. A Jersey Girl (since age 13) with a lifelong love of TV journalism, Michelle is as honest and skilled a storyteller as you’ll find on the air.   

EDGE: When did the journalism bug first bite you? 

MC: It started with my grandmother Jean, my dad’s mother. We would watch Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt together. It dawned on me around age 13 that I loved learning and I loved people and I loved traveling. What if I could get paid for this and never grow up? What a great racket! 

EDGE: Whom did you model yourself after?

MC: I gravitated to Judy Woodruff, who [like me] was a Duke person. She wasn’t flashy, yet she had a no-nonsense approach to finding things out that, to me, seemed very elegant. I loved to watch her do interviews on television. She had a way of breaking things down where she would stop, back up and say Please clarify this. For me, coming of age when women were achieving more power and more parity, it was great to see that work like this was possible. I also admired Diane Sawyer and Charles Kuralt—salt of the earth, everyman, a North Carolina guy—and I loved Charlie Rose, who’s the king of giving a little bit of himself so his guests give more back. 

EDGE: Why broadcast journalism over print?

MC: I was always interested in the creativity that television affords one. Now I like the challenge. I’ll be out there covering the same story as my friends who are print journalists and they’re interviewing people on the phone in their car. I have to actually go get the person on television and get the pictures—that’s a challenge. But putting a story together is like making a little movie. Which is why I love television.

EDGE: What path took you from college grad to Eyewitness News in New York?

MC: I’d gone to graduate school for economics in Freiburg, Germany—I loved econ and poly sci—but at some point I thought, I don’t know what I’m doing over here. I want to go home and get a job as a reporter. I came back and sent out 208 résumés to different TV and radio stations. Nobody called me. Nobody bit. Nobody wanted to meet with me. So my mom said, “Why don’t you just go to these stations?If you pay for gas and Red Roof Inns and Denny’s, I’ll bring some library books and go with you.” So we took our station wagon and began zig-zagging through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and all the way down to Ft. Myers. We’d stop at the stations that didn’t write me back or take my phone calls. I’d wait two minutes, two hours—however long it took to talk to somebody. I offered to work free for a month to learn if I could really make a difference and be good at this. The only news director who kind of offered me a job was at WYFF in Greenville, South Carolina. Many years later, he called me and said, “Gosh, I knew you’d do something.” I couldn’t believe he remembered me.  Anyway, when we got down to Ft. Myers I called home and my dad said, “Atlantic City called. They’ve got a radio station job and an assignment desk job at the TV station.” It was WMGM Channel 40, the smallest NBC station in America. It was run out of a garage in Linwood, next to a 7–11. It paid $6 an hour. I said, “Oh my God! I’ll take it!” 

EDGE: Small station, big responsibility? 

MC: I worked very long hours. I think I made $14,500 that year. But I was hooked. I loved doing radio. I loved ripping stories. I loved writing stories in different ways. We didn’t have the Internet then, so I would call all the fire and police departments in the surrounding towns. I would just call and call and call. I spent my life on the telephone. I worked there as a reporter and later as a fill-in anchor for a year and a half.  Next I worked down in New Bern, North Carolina for WCTI Channel 12, then WNCN Channel 17 in Raleigh for two years.

EDGE: And then you got the call.

MC: Bart Feder, the news director in New York, saw me on somebody else’s audition tape. I was fill-in anchoring and I called out a story, saying, “We don’t have enough information on this. I don’t even understand what we just showed. We’re going to get that for you. I apologize.” Then the co-anchor said, “This is ridiculous. I can’t believe we dropped the ball like this. That’s awful.” Well, he thought it was a great moment and he inexplicably put me and him on his tape. So the news director called me and said, “This is Bart Feder from WABC in New York. I’ve heard great things about you and I was just wondering what else you’ve done.” I said, “Sir, let me just stop you there. I loved doing radio, but I want to stay in TV.” After a long silence he said, “I’m the news director at the flagship station for WABC- hyphen-TV.” I said, “Can we go back to 45 seconds ago when I wasn’t a complete moron?” He was laughing so hard. He said, “On your contrition alone, you basically just got the job.”

Courtesy of ABC-TV/Channel 7

EDGE: 2017 will mark your 20th year with Channel 7. A lot of news people make it to the New York market only to disappear a few years later. What is it that enabled you to carve out such a niche?

MC: I am so grateful, first and foremost, that I work for a TV station that doesn’t make a lot of changes. They cling steadfastly to the choices they make, and recognize that our viewer does not like a lot of change. 

EDGE: Local news is like comfort food.

MC: You’re right. But a lot of local TV stations don’t believe this. Some change all the time. I’m out in the field and I’m friendly with the reporters from other stations, but often I don’t know who these people are. At Channel 7, we have so many people who’ve been there 15, 20, 25, 30 years. We have a photographer celebrating 50 years at WABC this year. Our station is great about promoting people and staying the course. They are very rooted in You’re here. You’re good. You’re going to stay. So that doesn’t mean I’m great…but I’m good or good-plus. I’m lucky to work at a place that makes a commitment and sticks with it. Loyalty is important in this place.

EDGE: In 2000 and 2001, in a very compact amount of time, you did your skin cancer story and then reported from the scene of the trade towers on the morning of 9-11. How did those experiences, coming so close together, shape your life and career?

MC: They definitely got me hitched, those two things. I realized that we don’t know how long we’re going to be here, that there’s a timeline we don’t know about. I had the great fortune—I thought it was a misfortune at the time—to have my face blow up. I had all these stitches. I looked like a monster. Here I was crying in the bathtub and my boyfriend, Steve, gets in the tub fully clothed and embraces me. You don’t get to try guys out like that, to see if they’ll be there for better or worse. He passed the test with flying colors. I got the chance to see that he was a keeper.

Courtesy of Michelle Charlesworth

At the worst possible time, he really came through for me. I knew that he was my partner forever—even though we weren’t even engaged yet, even though I didn’t want to get married, even though I didn’t want kids. And then on 9–11, here I was, the first person broadcasting live, from the West Side Highway. We were being told by firefighters that the whole West Side Highway was going to blow up because there is a gas main the size of a city bus that runs the length of it, and it hadn’t been turned off or secured. No one has ever really told this story. I thought I was going to die. After what I’d seen, with the two towers down, I thought anything could happen. I started almost giggling to myself as I was running, thinking Boy, am I stupid. I’ve been worrying about all the wrong things. I never got married. I never had kids. So I had this amazing epiphany. The worst day in the world had the best message for me. It really did. Now Steve and I are married and we have two kids, Isabelle and Jack. There you go.

EDGE: The skin cancer story began as someone else’s story assignment. 

MC: Right! I wasn’t even supposed to be on it! It was a “Lunchtime Lipo” story. One of the feature reporters couldn’t make it that day, so here was this story about how you could stop in and get your fat sucked out. I thought, Okay…this is interesting. I’ll do it. And then as we were leaving the doctor’s office, my photographer asked about a mole on his eyebrow. I said, “Hey Frank, you’re not supposed to ask that. It’s not professional.” The doctor, Bruce Katz, said, “No, don’t worry about it…but I’d like to ask you about this thing on your cheek, next to your nose.” I thought he was kidding. I told him that every time I get a facial they just pop it. And he said, “Well, they might be popping your cancer. I want to biopsy that thing on your face right now.” Forty-eight hours later I realized he was right—I had a basal cell carcinoma. 

EDGE: So had they put someone else on it, the outcome for you personally could have been very different. Isn’t it interesting how small moments can create such a profound ripple on people’s lives?

MC: Talk about a throw-away moment! Had Frank not asked about his eyebrow and had I not scolded him…had I not filled in and been on that story that day…luck, luck, luck. 

EDGE: How long was the procedure and what did they do?

MC: It took all day long. First, they did a Mohs surgery, where instead of removing the cancer they take out a little bit at a time and keep checking the margin. Take a little out, go in and check, take a little out, go back and check. I ended up with a huge hole in the middle of my face that was the size of five or six dimes in a stack, which they sewed up. That took the longest time. Dr. Michael Bruck sewed me back together and he did an amazing job. He had to cut a football shape around the opening because if you just cut a circle it “puckers.” By elongating the defect, the two sides go together a lot better. Now I don’t even think about it, thank heaven, because the scar went from my nose to the side of my mouth, probably two inches. It was done so well. Dr. Bruck put it in my laugh line. I don’t even have to put makeup on it. 

EDGE: In your case, you suspect that your cancer is related to where you spent the first 12 years of your life.

MC: I have two hometowns, Durham, North Carolina and Princeton, New Jersey. I was born in Durham and lived there until I was 12. My dad was a professor at Duke University. There was arsenic in the well water where we lived in Durham. It was a well-documented study done at Duke Medical School, and interestingly one of the students who did that study, Dr. Ira Davis, ended up doing the surgery on my face—which I found out during my surgery. Crazy. I was telling him that I thought people who damaged their skin by having sunburns were the ones who got skin cancer, which I never had. He asked me where I grew up. Durham. Where? Cornwallis Road. He’s like, You’ve gotta be kidding me…past Kerley? Yes. He said, “We did a study on arsenic in well water in agrarian neighborhoods and that’s exactly where you were.” I said, “Yeah, we drank well water every single day. And we have cancer elsewhere in my family.”

EDGE: The entire experience was covered nationally on Good Morning America. Talk about taking one for the team.

MC: That was surreal. That was crazy. But it was good, because my skin cancer didn’t look like skin cancer and I don’t have a lot of moles. It touched a lot of people who went and got things checked out that didn’t look like classic skin cancer—people who, like me, weren’t typical candidates for skin cancer, who thought you should be looking for moles that have odd shapes or that change in color. 

EDGE: You always hear about public figures who want to use their fame to do good. In your case, you were able to do so.

MC: Yes. Hopefully, my story helped change the way we think about skin cancer. I think it did. People still come up to me and say, “Show me your scar, Michelle.” 

EDGE: Really.

MC: They do…and then they show me theirs!  

TAKE THAT, SUNSHINE!

“Sunscreen is a part of my life,” says Michelle Charlesworth. “I wear it on my face and my neck 24/7, 365 days a year.” 

John D’Angelo, DO Chairman/Emergency Medicine Trinitas Regional Medical Center

Dr. John D’Angelo, Chairman of Emergency Medicine at Trinitas, recommends that anyone who has had a skin cancer scare do the same. As for everyone else, sunscreen is a must any time you are likely to be exposed to the sun for long periods of time. What’s a long period?

“The sun’s ultraviolet rays can damage unprotected skin in as little as 15 minutes,” says Dr. D’Angelo. “Wear sunscreen with UVA and UVB protection with an SPF of 15 or higher and don’t be shy about reapplying it often.”

Some folks, he adds, need to be more vigilant than others, including those with light-colored skin, red or blonde hair, multiple moles or a history of sunburns. 

“And obviously, if you have a personal or family history of skin cancer, like Michelle, you need to protect yourself at all times. And everyone should schedule routine skin exams with their physician or dermatologist.”

Editor’s Note: Michelle’s father, professor James H. Charlesworth, is still teaching at Princeton, where he is director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project. Special thanks to Rob Rubilla for setting this interview in motion.

Celebrity Chef Marcus Samuelsson

Why are you head over heels about cooking?

I love the creativity of cooking and eating. Cooking is very rewarding. What I love about it is that you can cook a meal and can share it, you can share where you’ve been on a journey, you can share where you’re going, you can share what you’re excited about. It can be spiritual; you can really bring your mood into the food. But it is also something that still is both a craft and an art. I practice cooking almost every day. It’s a combination of work ethic, craftsmanship, and artistry.

When did you realize you had the knack for it?

When I was a teenager. I started to make meals for my family and everyone loved my food, even the pickiest of eaters. My grandmother helped me find that passion and my parents gave me my work ethic. Working in France showed me what it would take, and then coming to this incredible environment here in New York City pushed me even more, working with the chefs from Harlem EatUp and other local chefs, like Jonathan Waxman, Daniel Boulud and Melba Wilson. They’re the ones inspiring and pushing me every day.

Is there a difference between cooking for Americans and Europeans?

I do believe that there is. In America, you have a multicultural culinary base with a variety of different consumers, which makes it more interesting. In America, the biggest difference is we have diversity. The bigger the diversity the more you have to take into consideration. Maybe there won’t be as much pork on the menu, maybe you have to think about more vegetarian dishes. You have to think about people’s choices in order to feed a more diverse nation.

What is your favorite ingredient at the moment?

I am intrigued by seafood, even the most simple, like soft shell crab. I also like rhubarb.

Are you head over heels for a particular cookbook?

White Heat is my favorite, by chef Marco Pierre White. He showed me a different path in France. And I love Leah Chase’s And Still I Cook. She is one of my mentors.

Julia Child said careful cooking is love. Do you agree?

I completely agree. It is a way of caring. I think it applies to everything we do. Everything that I know and every place that I have been has always revolved around cooking. Whether I am breaking bread with my family in Harlem or in Ethiopia, to me it is one in the same, and I love it.

How would you tailor a menu for the ultimate date night?

The menu would have intimate, shareable food. I’d begin with oysters. I think there must be champagne, definitely some bubbles. I love something that talks about a journey a couple has shared together, like the Caribbean—for instance, grilled lobster with rice. They’d finish with strawberries and buttermilk sorbet, to bring back some childhood memories.

Editor’s Note: Marcus Samuelsson is a favorite contestant and judge on cooking competition shows, and owns Red Rooster in Harlem. He holds the distinction of being the youngest chef ever to receive a 3-Star review from the New York Times. As executive chef at Aquavit, he was named the top chef in New York City by the James Beard Foundation. Editor At Large Tracey Smith actually spent more than 5 Minutes with Marcus. Log onto edgemagonline.com to learn more about Red Rooster and his life as a celebrity chef.

Lou Gossett may not be executing roundhouse kicks anymore, but his power within the motion picture industry has hardly diminished. During the most recent Academy Awards, the camera found him again and again. Gossett, you may recall, was the first African American actor to take home a Best Supporting Oscar (for An Officer and a Gentleman). He also happens to be an influential member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as a hallowed figure in the greater Hollywood community, which recently endured some high-profile criticism for its lack of diversity. As Editor at Large Tracey Smith discovered, Louis Gossett, Jr. is all about diversity. In fact, it has a lot to do with his unique ability to portray forceful, independent characters who command a story or a scene…and then slowly, grudgingly reveal their vulnerabilities.    

EDGE: Are you drawn to forceful roles because they are written this way, or is it a dimension you like to bring to your characters?

LG: I’m not sure. Some of them now are, of course, designed that way for me. I could always play a variety of strong characters. I’d shave my head and play anything I wanted! But I also played Anwar Sadat, which was astounding, and I did Enemy Mine, which was a cult film. So the choices of parts were actually quite diverse.   

Photo by David Walden

EDGE: Where do you think that comes from? 

LG: It came out of Coney Island—it came out of my childhood [laughs]. I was taught as a child how to live successfully with others, especially those that differ. 

EDGE: What was your Brooklyn neighborhood like? 

LG: It was a diverse camaraderie coming out of the mud of the Great Depression. I was not born in a “black” neighborhood. I was born into a “society” that was happening after the resurrection of mankind following the Depression. There was a lot of stuff occurring, including a fear that the Communists were taking over—which they were not. But as a result, the intellectual cream of the crop was being run out of higher education. Dr. William Jansen, the New York City Schools Chancellor, moved them all out to the “boondocks” of Brooklyn, where they started an incredible renaissance of learning and art. I had the benefit of a Latin teacher in third grade! My classmates were the children of doctors, dentists, lawyers and schoolteachers. I had my heroes: I saw Jackie Robinson become a Dodger, Ralph Bunche at the United Nations, Walter White and the NAACP. Other kids had theirs—Superman, Hopalong Cassidy. But during my childhood we had no thought of separation because of race. If I didn’t eat dinner at home, I might go to my next-door neighbor’s, where gefilte fish was on the table. Or down the block for corned beef and cabbage. And long before there were cell phones, there were old ladies in the windows making sure the neighborhood was straight.

EDGE: So that experience prepared you to become an actor, to slip inside a character? Is that how you won your first role, in Take a Giant Step?

LG: Yes. I was 17 and had never seen a Broadway play. One day, my English teacher, who read the trades, said, “Hey, Louie. I know you’ve never acted before, but I like the way you read the stuff in class. They’re looking for a kid about your age to play a lead in a Broadway show. Tell your mother to bring you down.”

EDGE: You were very active on the stage during the 1950s and 1960s. But movie and television roles must have been harder to come by. What were some of the challenges you faced in Hollywood and, also, how did you involve yourself in the civil rights effort as you became more well known?

LG: There was something wrong to me about marching for peace, so I did it by personal example—through the roles that I chose, and triumphs in the theater and movies. I hoped it would impress upon people that there was no such thing as “impossible” for the young. In terms of challenges, yes I was challenged a great deal. I was told by the casting people—either verbally or subtly—“I don’t care how many awards you win, you’re still black, you still have to prove yourself.” The limitations I came up against forced me to be as good as I could possibly be.

EDGE: What was your professional life like at that time?

LG: I got a guitar and played folk music for a while in between jobs, and I survived through television. Television was very good to me. I lived well in Malibu, down the street from Michael Landon. Sometimes a guest role was a one- and-done because of the difficulty due to discrimination. But I was able to make some alliances. My first TV movie was Companions in Nightmare, in 1968. Melvyn Douglas played a psychiatrist with a murderer in his group therapy. The cast included Gig Young, who won the Emmy, Ann Baxter, William Redfield, Leslie Nielsen, Patrick O’Neil, and me. These were great actors who came from New York, from Broadway. And they were wonderful to me. I wouldn’t be sitting here if it weren’t for them. 

ABC Television

EDGE: In 1977, you won an Emmy for your role in Roots. What happened to your professional life after that?

LG: It exploded! I didn’t know that everybody would stop what they were doing to watch the series. That was a pleasant surprise. I was working a great deal already, though. Around that time, I did an episode of Little House on the Prairie, I did The Rockford Files with Jimmy Garner, and an ABC Movie of the Week. And a wonderful renaissance was happening in television in the 1970s with all that came out of Norman Lear’s consciousness, like All In the Family, The Jeffersons, and Good Times, as well as later shows, like Benson. 

EDGE: How did you prepare for an intense, emotional role like Fiddler in Roots?

LG: I did very little preparation.

EDGE: Why?

LG: Because it was in my roots. Fiddler was like my grandparents. Roots was actually very emotional on all of our parts. My best friend at the time was Vic Morrow, who played the guy in charge of the slaves. There was a scene where he ordered a beating to make LeVar Burton’s character say that his name isn’t Kunta Kinte anymore, its Toby.  Vic came up to me in advance and apologized. “Lou, I have to do this scene fully.” He did it so fully that I was transformed into saying, “Kunta Kinte—that’s what your name is. That’s what you’ll always be. There’s going to be another day, you hear me?” And we are in another day. Alex Haley told that story quite frequently.

EDGE: You’re perhaps best known for your Oscar-winning role in An Officer and a Gentleman. What are the “hard-to-find” Lou Gossett performances that are not as well known?

LG: A number of television movies. There’s Goodbye Miss Fourth of July, Lawman without a Gun, Carolina Skeletons, and two pilots that I did, To Dance with Olivia, and The Color of Love: Jacey’s Story.

EDGE: You mentioned Enemy Mine earlier, in which you played an alien. That was an interesting choice for a number of reasons. Did the fact you would be physically unrecognizable make the role more appealing or less appealing?  

Kings Road Entertainment/SLM Production Group

LG: Everybody turned that role down! You couldn’t see the actor’s face or the eyes. It was a challenge, an artistic challenge, to be able to make a performance credible without the natural use of your eyes, face or body—on top of the five or six hours of make-up. Plus, we had to create a species from scratch, with a philosophy and a language that doesn’t exist, and then get into the hearts and minds of an audience. It was a tough artistic stretch, but a great, great story.

EDGE: Have you always enjoyed testing yourself?

LG: Oh yeah! You’ve got to raise the artistic bar! 

EDGE: What do you like about it?

LG: That you never lose your concentration. That’s what’s incredible—you’ve got to keep on trying, you’ve got to dig it out, and deal with all the stuff that gets in your way. The instrument for the actor is himself, his body, his thinking, his emotions, his physical stuff, spiritual stuff. He’s got to be prepared to develop any character without any personal crutches.

EDGE: Our readers were big Boardwalk Empire fans. You had a memorable part in Season 4 as Oscar Boneau, a mentor, if you will, to Michael K. Williams’s character, Chalky White. 

LG: It was a great opportunity to play that character because Oscar was Grandpa. A grandfather is in a position of mentorship, what I call selfless service. All the sun comes out when you do that, regardless of whatever you’ve gone through in your life. After that episode aired, people came out of the woodwork, especially young actors. They liked it a lot. It was never nominated or anything like that. But I don’t go for the nominations. I go for what gets the message across.

EDGE: Speaking of nominations and awards, did you get a lot of questions about the Academy Awards this year?

LG: Yeah. But let’s back it up against the bigger picture. Once you’re in the Academy you’re not a black person in the Academy. You’re a member. Black movies, Jewish movies, gay movies, white movies, it does not matter; we are one bunch of people there. The best thing about our organization is that, when they know they’ve made a mistake, they overcompensate and never make it again. 

EDGE: In the midst of the current discussion, does your golden statue mean more to you, less to you…?

LG: It’s a reminder—a reminder that you can go as far as you can imagine yourself going, if you prepare yourself properly. For kids, that message is simple: If you shoot for a ten and you get a five, you have five more than you started out with.

EDGE: What else have you learned on this remarkable journey?  

LG: Longevity has been a good teacher. I believe that if there is fear, there is no faith, especially when times are hard. I wrote a short poem on this subject:

Things will happen as they will. 

The world will never be stronger than faith

Although some of our wildest doubt may sometimes bother our dreams.

Love when it comes, it never comes too late.

I want to be a humble, teachable, moldable part of society and to get myself in a receptive position—spiritually, emotionally, physically—because God wants me to know myself and to conduct myself accordingly, one day at a time. To young people, I say be responsible for yourself and then you will become ambassadors of peace, and miracles can happen.

EDGE: Paul Robeson once said, “As an artist I come to sing, but as a citizen I will always speak for peace, and no one can silence me in this.” What do those words mean to you? 

LG: Back in the old days, if you had been a minority and said this, you would’ve been branded a rebe

l. Today, you’re a responsible citizen. The sooner we get to that one people, one nation, one world, one consciousness, the better we’re going to be. We’re not there yet…but thank God we’re going in the right direction. 

A Raisin In the Sun/Belasco Theatre

THE GOSSETT FILE

Louis Cameron Gossett, Jr.

Born: May 27, 1936 (Brooklyn, NY)

First Broadway Play: Take a Giant Step (1953)

First TV Appearance: The Big Story (1958)

First Hollywood Film: A Raisin In the Sun (1961) Outstanding Lead Actor Emmy: Roots (1977)

Best Supporting Oscar: An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)

Best Supporting Golden Globe: An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)

Best Supporting Golden Globe: The Josephine Baker Story (1991)

Primetime Emmy Nominations: 7

David Walden

Can You Hum a Few Bars?

During the 1960s, Lou co-wrote the popular war protest song “Handsome Johnny” with Richie Havens.

Did You Know?

Lou’s nephew, Robert Gossett, co-stars with Kyra Sedgwick and J.K. Simmons on the TNT series The Closer.

Eracism

Gossett is the founder, president and chairman of the Eracism Foundation. Its mission is to contribute to the creation of a society where racism does not exist. He defines Eracism as the removal from existence of the belief that one race, one culture, one people is superior to another. For more information or to get involved, log onto eracismfoundation.org.

There are certain roles that even the most accomplished actresses won’t touch. Making an infuriating, exasperating character believable—and, more importantly, likeable—is right at the top of that list. It is the definition of working without a net. For Lisa Kudrow, portraying these women has become almost second nature. From her brilliant run as loopy Phoebe on Friends to her quasi-authority figures in the cable series Web Therapy and The Comeback, she has elevated the portrayal of the terminally clueless to an art form. As EDGE’s Gerry Strauss discovered, comedy for Lisa is serious business…but also fun and games.

EDGE: Do you recall what first inspired you to go into show business?

LK: I liked performing, even in nursery school. I liked coming home and doing the entire album of Alice in Wonderland that they played for us during that time—standing on the fireplace, just reciting the entire thing. How anyone sat through it is beyond me. I am the third child, by many years, and the kind of child that wanted attention. Positive attention. Maybe that’s why.

NBC/Warner Bros. Television

EDGE: How did your parents pass along the work ethic you’re known for?

LK: My father always said, “I don’t care what any of you do as long as you do the best you can at it. If you’re a garbage collector, I’d expect you to be the best garbage collector.” I applied that to schoolwork and tried to do the best that I could, and I always tried to just work as hard as I could.

EDGE: Were you a competitive kid?

LK: Yes. I had a certain level of competitiveness. I wanted to score better than other people.

EDGE: There was a long period where you didn’t perform.

LK: I put it away for high school and college. I put it in a drawer and locked it. But that love of performing was always in there.

EDGE: When you got back into acting there were some near misses and rejections—Saturday Night Live, Frasier. Did you set a deadline for yourself in terms of getting out?

LK: I don’t remember a deadline, but do I remember when the initial blows happened having a very brief consideration that maybe this isn’t meant to be. But I just couldn’t allow that to happen. That meant I had to figure out how to keep going. I would just replay every recording I had in my head of someone saying No, I think you’re really good, so that I could just be full of that. It’s like taking vitamins. I had to supplement with the encouraging things people I trusted were saying.

EDGE: You turned a minor character in Mad About You—Ursula the waitress— into a keeper. Was that the career plan?

LK: I don’t think I was that clever. In fact, the way that role came about was a last-minute call in the morning. “Can you go to Mad about You? They’re offering you this role. The character doesn’t even have a name. It’s called ‘waitress’… and you have to be there in an hour.” I didn’t even know what the lines were. It was two lines. These were agents saying, “I think you should pass.” I thought, I can’t pass. I need to work. That’s the best show on TV and you don’t say no. I got in my car and I drove down there. I remember I was a little nervous because I had no idea what I’d be doing and I just thought, No matter what, just listen and respond, and be funny. When I saw the lines, I just thought, No problem. She’s an idiot. Okay. She’s an idiot…got it.

EDGE: How did Ursula become a regular character?

LK: At the end of the week, Danny Jacobson pulled me over and said, “I think you’re funny, and I would like to write this character more, and have her in this show more, if that is okay with you. Just five more episodes.” I was about to start figuring out what kind of day job I would have. Because of Ursula, I didn’t have to look for work.

EDGE: How did you develop the character of Phoebe in Friends?

LK: The great thing I remember about Phoebe was that the audition piece was this monologue in the pilot that gives her whole back-story. My take on that really was to give a lot of definition to this person, that she’s cheerful about—or just refusing to see—the horrible, traumatic things that happened in her life. Her mom killed herself and then her stepfather went to jail, and she lived in a car, and she thought that was okay. That’s who she was going to be. Just this person who didn’t acknowledge reality the same way everybody else did.

EDGE: Was there any aspect of just playing Phoebe for all those years that frustrated or bored you?

LK: No, I was not bored, and I didn’t feel like, Oh my God, I’ve got to do something else and I’ve got to get out of here. Just period, I did not. I loved going there every day. I loved laughing hysterically with these five other people that cracked me up every day. And I mean it. It’s true. There were some seasons we’d come back and I’d think, I don’t know what I am doing. LeBlanc one time took me aside, so smartly, and said, “Look, there’s no more work to do because you know who this person is. You keep trying to do work, and there’s no work to do. You’ve got it down. Just relax.” He was right. I was that good student thinking, I put this much work into my homework before so I need to do the same now. This was the cushiest job, with family. We’d been through fires, the six of us together.

EDGE: You also were free to do films in between seasons.

LK: That was the other fantastic thing about Marta, David, and Kevin. They allowed the schedules to work so that we could do a film even when we were doing the show.

EDGE: In The Comeback, the Valerie Cherish character is a former sitcom star using a reality show to launch herself back into the spotlight—a story about a woman who allowed a sense of paranoia and fear about her career define who she was. Did you experience anything like that after Friends?

LK: Maybe there’s something wrong with me but I was not worried or nervous about what was coming next. I’d shot an independent film when we were done with Friends and I thought, I’d be thrilled to just do those forever because I don’t need money now, thanks to Friends. I can do whatever I want. But then this great idea happened for The Comeback, and it was sort of, Well, we’ve got to do it now. We went into HBO to tell them what the idea was and they said, “Yes, so just do it. Write a script.” We wrote a script fast, in three weeks or something. Crazy. Then, we shot the pilot and they said, “Let’s do 12 or 13 of these.” But I completely agree with what you were saying—everyone has some of those fears and insecurities in them. The thing with Valerie was that she was desperately trying to look like she was holding it all together and in control of it all, that her hands were firmly on the reins of her own career. And they weren’t.

EDGE: Now as the series reboots, it’s nine years later—

LK: And she’s a little more desperate and has a little less pride. But the DNA is still the same. Valerie is doing a pilot presentation with some USC film students for Andy Cohen, and she’s looking over clips of what she’s been up to since The Comeback got cancelled. She believes that she was a pioneer of reality television. She’s still acting as if she’s the instructor for the audience, teaching everyone about the life of an actor and what the entertainment business is like.

EDGE: How do you, as real-life role as a mom and wife, view the invasion of privacy that Valerie and her family deal with on a reality show like The Comeback?

LK: I have respect for the privacy of my family. If I speak about them, I have their consent. Valerie is so desperate for the spotlight, she always compromises the privacy of her loved ones. To her, that spotlight is synonymous with “the greater good.”

EDGE: You tend to portray some distinctly flawed characters. Is that more fun than playing someone who is normal?

LK: Yes, much more fun. To me, that’s what funny—people who have no idea how they’re coming off. Valerie thinks she’s pulling it off with her composure, her dignity, her phony-baloney way of talking, and she thinks people are eating it up as if it’s 1978. That cracks me up.

EDGE: The same could be said for Web Therapy’s Fiona Wallice.

LK: She’s so insensitive…but really, she’s not even aware that what she’s saying would be disturbing to anybody. That kind of insensitivity makes me laugh. Those things…I just love it when people have no idea how they come off. There’s just a disconnect.

EDGE: What are the biggest sources of pride in your career?

LK: Okay. I’d say The Comeback, only because I got to actually create that one and write it and produce it, as well as be in it. I am proud of that. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen before, and I think it was good work. I am proud of Web Therapy because, again, it’s like nothing that anyone had ever seen before, and we weren’t sure if just two people talking and improvising would sustain anything—and whether the people we have doing it would be willing to sit and improvise. Who Do You Think You Are?—even though I didn’t create it—that’s the kind of thing that wasn’t really on American television. I am glad we talked NBC into doing it. Then, there has to be Friends. I have to say Friends.

EDGE: Contractually?

LK: (laughs) That’s so funny! No. No. I am proud of Friends because that was the first time that characters on a show were all young adults, and I remember the network was really nervous at the time. They’re like, “Who’s the grown-up? There is no grown-up in this show. You guys have got to put a grown-up in there.” Now, looking back, that’s really funny. Because, after Friends, everything changed.

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

In 2010, executive producer Lisa Kudrow brought the British genealogy documentary series Who Do You Think You Are? to American television. The program, which paired celebrities with genealogists to uncover stories from their family history, ran for three seasons on NBC and now airs on TLC. Kudrow herself starred in one episode, traveling to Belarus and Poland. Others who appeared include Spike Lee, Gwyneth Paltrow, Martin Sheen, Edie Falco, Zooey Deschanel and Jim Parsons.

I saw the show in the UK when I was there in 2007, and thought it was the best show I’d ever seen. I didn’t understand why it wasn’t on in the U.S. There are these fantastic details from history that have a personal effect on families and alter the line of a family, so it’s very emotional. I thought everything about it was fascinating, and it was so well done.

When I got back here, I found out that Alex Graham created the show and then it turned out he did some of my favorite PBS programs, including Manor House and Colonial House. They were so well done. I thought this was not a fluke—he knows what he’s doing. We called him up to see if he wanted to do it here and he said Yes.

At first I wasn’t even considering participating. My father had done a lot of research and made a huge family tree. I wasn’t thinking we would have a story, coming from an Eastern European Jewish background. I was more interested in other people and their stories. But Alex said, “You should do it.” I realized that, of course, I should do it because I am asking other people to do it. I need to know what I am

Television is in the midst of a Golden Era. By most accounts, there are more challenging, intelligent and interesting roles for women than ever before. Which makes finding exactly the right actress to fill these roles more important than ever before. Producers would probably sleep a little easier if they could just print up a few dozen copies of Lisa Edelstein. During a career that stretches back more than two decades, she has distinguished herself as one of the most challenging, intelligent and interesting performers on American television. Lisa grew up in Wayne, the daughter of a pediatrician and a social worker. Her passion for performing took her to NYU and then MTV, and eventually to a series of recurring roles on series such as Seinfeld, Ally McBeal, Felicity, Leap of Faith and The West Wing. After 150-plus episodes as one of the stars of House, Lisa was picked to star in Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce—a series developed by Marti Noxon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Grey’s Anatomy, Mad Men) and inspired by the best-selling line of Girlfriends’ Guide books by Vicki Iovine. The series is unique in many respects, most notably as the first scripted series developed by the Bravo network. As EDGE Editor-at-Large Tracey Smith discovered, this is hardly what makes Lisa unique…and far from her first pioneering role.

EDGE: When did you first feel comfortable stepping out on stage?

LE: When I was born. (laughs) I never wanted to do anything else.  I just loved performing. I did a lot of dance recitals and a lot of school plays. If you asked me to carry a sign across the stage, I’d be thrilled. I told my parents when I was four years old that this was what I was going to do for a living. As soon as I was old enough, I began investigating how to do it as a grown-up, so starting at a young age I would go into New York to see where the agencies were and to get pictures made, just trying to figure out how things worked.

EDGE: Where were you in the process by the time you had enrolled at NYU?

Photo by Nadine Raphael • Dress: ALLSAINTS, Bloomingdales, Short Hills

LE: I had learned enough on my own that I had actually become a bit cynical in class. I felt that they weren’t actually talking about how to be an actor, they were just doing an acting class. I wanted to know how to be an actor. I was still figuring it out, just stumbling my way through. I was really involved with the club scene in New York at the time and I got a lot of attention for that. I sort of used that attention to produce a musical that I wrote about the AIDS crisis. It enabled me to be seen as a professional, but also it was so horrendous what was happening, it was really important that we found a way to talk about it.

EDGE: You also had a stint on MTV.

LE: Yes, for about seven months. I called it “4 Hours a Day 5 days a Week of National Humiliation” (laughs), It was really awful, but I learned a lot.

EDGE: What were some of your other early experiences in television?

LE: One of my first jobs in Los Angeles was L.A. Law. That was very exciting. Then I did a series that no one ever saw because in the middle of the fourth episode, the Executive Producer insulted the head of the studio during a script review and the whole show was canceled on my way to work. (laughs) No more job! There are a lot of things that happen along the way, a lot of “almost-jobs” that might have changed my life, but didn’t. But also a lot of little jobs that did change my life. You just keep going forward.

EDGE: What separates those who make it from those who don’t?

LE: I think one of the first things that weeds people out of this business is a lack of fortitude, not a lack of talent. This is a very, very challenging business emotionally. You need persistence and stubbornness, you have to really love the job. Not everybody is so fortunate to love what they’re doing, so in a way you’re cursed by wanting to be an artist (laughs). What a difficult and challenging career path this is. Yet at the same time, you’re blessed with knowing that there’s something out there that you love you to do. It is a real gift if what you’re doing also feeds you. I’ve always been very grateful for that, even at the bleakest moments. You know, the funny thing about being an actor—unlike most jobs—is that when you say, “I’m an actor,” you have to prove it. People want to know where you’ve done it, and then they want to decide whether or not they’ve seen it, or if they liked it. (laughs) You’re sort of judged, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. Sometimes they just feel sorry for you. I think that’s true for any career in the arts, but particularly acting.

EDGE: You are now the star of Bravo’s first scripted series. That’s a big culture change for a network. Were you involved in that transition?

LE: No, no. It was already happening when I got there. This was not the first pilot they made—I think it was the second. They’d been reading scripts and playing with this idea for years. I read that first script and I loved it, but Bravo didn’t feel it was the right brand for the network. However, I already could tell by reading it that they were on the right track. They were picking smart projects that were dark and funny and interesting. After us, they are doing another show called Odd Mom Out. It’s a half-hour comedy and it’s really funny and really dark and I really like it. Bravo’s a great network. They really have thrown everything at us in the most wonderful way. They have been incredible promoters and really behind the show creatively. They are genuinely excited about the decisions they made and going for it—there’s no wishy-washiness. They take a really long time to make a decision, so when they make a decision they are not kidding. It’s been a real pleasure.

EDGE: What type of feedback are you hearing about your character, Abby?

LE: It is so exciting. It’s really exciting. When I did House, people would come over and talk about the show and how much they loved it, or ask things about Hugh Laurie’s character like, “doesn’t it drive you crazy he’s so mean to you?” But on this show, when people recognize me, they want to talk about their lives, they want to tell me why they relate to the show, and who it reminds them of and when my character did such and such. It’s very personal. It’s a great feeling because I really love this project and I really want to do more of it. I love the writing, I love the people I’m working with. The experience has been extraordinary. I’ve been working for a long time, so having an experience like this that tops everything else—it’s been a dream come true.

EDGE: You’ve worked with some seriously funny co-stars, including Hugh on House and, now, Janeane Garofalo on Girlfriends’ Guide. Does she bring a lot of silly to the set?

LE: Janeane is hilarious, but she’s not a very silly person. She is very serious, with a very sharp wit, but she’s not a clown. It is very important to Janeane that she can inhabit what her character is doing and saying, so she works in a very specific way and it was really a lot of fun to volley with her in that way. She’s great, she’s smart, and she’s a very interesting woman.

EDGE: The two of you grew up less than an hour apart, in Wayne and Newton. Did you already know each other?

LE: We did. We actually met many years ago, in 1990. She worked at MTV around the same time I did, and we have a lot of mutual friends.

Photo by Nadine Raphael
Vest: NICK+ZOE, Lord and Taylor, Westfield; Shoes: POUR LA VICTOIRE, Sole Shoes, Westfield

EDGE: Do you and Janeane bring some Jersey Girl toughness to your characters?

LE: Janeane’s character is tough, but I don’t know if Abby is tough. She certainly bounces back, but I don’t know if tough is a word I would use with Abby.

EDGE: Each of your episodes is themed around a “Rule”…do you have your own set of “Lisa Rules” that have allowed you to be successful?

LE: Yeah, I guess I do. I do have some rules. Never say yes to a job you don’t want. Never go out with a man who can’t ask you out on a specific date. He’s too wishy-washy. No one can eat meat in my house. Those are my rules, for me. I wouldn’t say they apply to everybody.

EDGE: You once said in an interview that you don’t care if you’re the star, that you really like to be part of an ensemble…and that you want to “use my brain as much as I possibly can.”

LE: Is that an old quote? That’s amazing in a huge way because now I get to sort of experience all of that. What’s so exciting about the Bravo series is how deeply involved and relied upon I am. All parts of me are used, and I love that. I am working 16 hours a day when we’re shooting almost every day. My attitude and dedication to the project has a big effect on the set. It’s important to me that the place I work is the place I’ve always wanted to work and having the opportunity to create that type of environment is a real blessing. I hope I’m doing a good job. Marti Noxon really trusts me. When a scene is being constructed, she often listens to my ideas and I feel like a real participant in the creative process. My opinion matters to Robert Duncan McNeill, our Producing Director, who has a lot of input in how we’re telling the overall arching story, and that feels good. I feel like I’m in a leadership position. After working for 25 years or so that feels great, it’s exciting. I take it seriously and I’m doing my absolute best.

EDGE: Since EDGE is supported by a medical center, of course we have to ask a couple of House questions. How did you land the role of Lisa Cuddy, the hospital administrator?

LE: I just auditioned for it. Brian Singer, who was directing the pilot had been a huge fan of The West Wing and, I didn’t know this at the time, he loved my character Brittany on the show. So when I came in to read, he was already on the Lisa Edelstein team. Cuddy started off sort of slowly, the character didn’t have a lot to do in the first season because there so was much to be done in developing the structure of the show itself. But little by little, they started to infuse Cuddy with more character, the relationship got more complicated, things were revealed and it got more fun.

EDGE: How does one prepare for the role of a hospital administrator?

LE: I think you just go in knowing she is a medical professional, she’s a professional woman, she’s really well-educated, she’s got a lot on her plate. I certainly didn’t study endocrinology or anything, which was her specialty. I think it’s more about understanding what it means to be highly successful in your field. She would have been one of very few women who were running hospitals at the time if she existed in the real world. And she would have been very, very, young.

EDGE: Having worked in a fictional hospital, are you more confident or less confident when you have to go to a real hospital?

LE: Oh, I grew up around hospitals because my dad is a doctor. I’ve always felt confident in hospitals and I really love medicine, so I know how to hear it, how to listen and what questions to ask.  I’m an advocate for a friend of mine who is going through some terrible stuff, so I’m good at that. EDGE

Editor’s Note: From the small world department…it turns out that Lisa’s father, Dr. Alvin Edelstein, was known to the EDGE staff long before Lisa became the family’s star. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Dr. Edelstein treated the children of one of the magazine’s editors!

When it comes to sideswiping mob bosses, most people would agree that one degree of separation is a little too close for comfort. For Kathrine Narducci, it’s kind of a sweet spot. She played the torn parent of a young boy being courted by the local crime kingpin in A Bronx Tale (opposite Robert DeNiro), and Charmaine Bucco, the saucy restaurateur in The Sopranos. Narducci sparkled in both devilishly difficult roles. In 2017, she reunited with DeNiro in the HBO film The Wizard of Lies, this time portraying Bernie Madoff’s longtime secretary. Once again, Narducci took a complex character and knocked it out of the park. Editor at Large Tracey Smith caught up with “Nardooch” after shooting wrapped to talk about how she found these characters. And how they found her. 

EDGE: What do you consider your defining role?  

KN: I would say A Bronx Tale because that was the first thing I ever did. I have Robert DeNiro to thank for that. He doesn’t even know…well, yes, he does know because every time I see him I tell him! He and his partner, Jane Rosenthal—who have been together since ’93—they’re the reason I am even able to have a career, so I don’t forget that. Your first role opposite Robert DeNiro? You couldn’t ask for a better person on this planet. He’s such a kind, understanding, giving human being first, and then an actor, and that helps. 

Savoy Pictures 

EDGE: How did you land the role of Rosina opposite him?

KN: I took my son, who was seven years old at the time, for the role of the boy, Calogero. When I was there, I realized they had auditions for the mother. I didn’t realize that the mother was actually DeNiro’s wife because they didn’t give me a script. They just gave me sides. The kid’s open call was like a cattle call and my son was the last little boy to go in. When he was done, I was waiting outside in the waiting room. I was a “closet case” actress [laughs]. I didn’t tell anybody I was trying to do things like go on auditions, and my family didn’t know. When I took my son there I thought, Wow, I could meet Robert DeNiro at this audition if I get my son here on this open call. Well, while I was sitting there, women started coming in like around my age, that looked like me, that walked like me, that talked like me, and I asked the casting director when my son came out, “Why are they still here?” She said, “Oh, they’re here for the wife but that’s not an open call—you need to be a SAG actress, are you SAG?”  I said, “No.” Then she said, “Well…if we don’t find who we’re looking for today, Bob wants to make the wife an open call tomorrow.” She told me to then give her a call in the morning and she would let me know.   

EDGE: Did you know who “Bob” was?

KN: No, I didn’t know Bob was Robert DeNiro [laughs]. So I started getting ready for work for the next morning, and then decided to not go to work, and to call that woman to see if I could go in for the movie.  I called her and she said, “Yeah we’re here. C’mon over!” They put me on tape, sent it to Robert DeNiro, and the next morning I got up to go to work again when I got a call and they said, “Bob saw your tape and he’d like to meet you down in Tribeca and wants you to do a call back.” I went down to Tribeca where I met Bob and Chazz Palminteri, and Bob said, “There’s a slight chance we’ll call you back.”  When I got home, on my answering machine that night, I was invited back! I went back a thousand times and then finally screen tested, which led to me getting the role. It really was an incredibly long, hard process because he kept making me come back and come back. 

EDGE: That must have been nerve-wracking.

KN: When I finally got the role and I showed up at work the first day on set, he goes, “You know, you need to know you beat twenty-five hundred girls.” I wasn’t nervous until that point! 

EDGE: DeNiro has said he believes that, when it’s your time and your role, there’s nothing to keep you from getting it.

KN: I believe that is very true. When it is your time, nothing can keep you from getting the roles you want. Bob was fantastic! It was a great learning experience for me, unbelievable. Everything else pales in comparison to that experience. So then I started getting really good stuff. It’s funny, right after that I got my second role. It was a small one, a cameo role in the remake of Miracle on 34th Street opposite Sir Richard Attenborough, a wonderful British actor and also an amazing director. I couldn’t even believe it, oh my God!  Then from there it was getting an agent, getting in a class and learning my craft.

FASHION TAILS Photographer: Devin Dygert, MUA: Jacqueline Holden, Hair: Carolina Yasukawa, Stylist: Eva Danielle, Rescue: LA Animal Rescue, Retoucher: Nadia Selander

EDGE: When you played Rosina in A Bronx Tale, how much did Chazz want you to be like his mother and how much did he trust you to develop the character? 

KN: Chazz and Bob said whatever you brought into the room is exactly who she is, so just do whatever comes organically—you were right in the room. Just do what you were doing and do what your instincts tell you because it’s on the money.  They didn’t want me to change anything. Chazz said to me, “Don’t worry. You have the essence of that, and don’t get in your head about it.” So that’s what I did and I went with my instincts.

EDGE: Were they a good team? 

KN: Chazz trusted DeNiro fully because he directed it and he was in it. That was his directing debut, you know.

EDGE: Your iconic role of Charmaine Bucco in The Sopranos came a few years later.

KN: In 1999, I got a call from Cathy Moriarty, who had also played DeNiro’s wife, in Raging Bull. She gave me the nickname

Upper Case Editorial

“Nardooch,” which everybody calls me.Cathy said, “Nardooch! You gotta go in for this role. This show is called The Sopranos.” And I was like, “I don’t sing!” [laughs] I called up my agent and he got me the audition. I auditioned for David Chase and then I got the role of Charmaine, which I played from the ’99 pilot until 2007, which was beautiful. It was an actor’s dream to just have a continuous paycheck and to be able to make it as an actor. 

EDGE: Why did Charmaine dislike Tony and Carmela so much? They had “invested” in Artie’s restaurant?

KN: She was definitely the strong voice of reason on that show. She’s the only one that never really flipped and could never be allured by that life. I had a scene with Edie Falco when I tell her I slept with Tony the summer she went away. I tell her in that scene, “I slept with Tony, Carmella, and to be honest with you, it wasn’t for me.”  I leave her standing there shocked! I wondered as an actor why Charmaine had this vendetta against Tony. In my mind, I felt that summer that I slept with him that he actually didn’t call me back, and that’s why I say to Carmela, “I coulda had him but I didn’t want him.” That would actually be a lie. I couldn’t have had him because he never called me back. It was a summer fling to him, and I think Charmaine held onto that—which was my ammunition. I had no backstory of why I would be against this man and I just felt it had to go this deep. It had to do with sex and love, because those are the things that women hold onto.

EDGE: You played another Italian character in The Wizard of Lies, which aired on HBO in May.

KN: I play an Italian but she’s not a “Mom Italian.” I’m opposite DeNiro again in the role of Eleanor Squillari, who was Bernie Madoff’s secretary for twenty-five years.  She was not just his gatekeeper, she was a very dedicated, hard worker. The devotion Eleanor had for Bernie was unbelievable. Her office was right out in front of Bernie’s and you had to get past her to get to Bernie. After Bernie was arrested, people started calling the office, cursing Eleanor out and asking where their money was. She realized that she handled all his business and that she’s in deep you-know-what. Everyone thinks I’m part of it. How could I not know he stole 365 billion dollars?

EDGE: How was it working with the director, Barry Levinson?

KN: Oh, my God, what an amazing director. The only note he gave me at the beginning of the table read, he told us all to not impersonate.   

EDGE: Was that character fun to play?

KN: Yes, because she was real. She was Bernie Madoff’s right-hand man. She was solid. And that is a big part of who I am. I’m very loyal to my real friends. I’m very devoted to my job. 

EDGE: Of the other characters you’ve played, who else reflected aspects of who you are? 

KN: As far as A Bronx Tale, I had a son that age and I was a mom who is nurturing a kid, which was a part of me. And like Charmaine Bucco, as I said, I’m a very loyal person. I am also a very good cook. And she ran that restaurant with an iron fist. I’m good at what I do and I live and breathe my career and I love it so much. And so did Charmaine. She didn’t take any crap. Nor do I! 

Editor’s Note: Kathrine Narducci is an ardent supporter of Fashion Tails. Fashion Tails is an initiative started to educate the public about the plight of homeless animals through the use of high fashion photography with celebrities.

Leading men come and go in Hollywood. Only a handful, though, have the ability to disappear into a supporting character. John Heard, who passed away shortly after this interview, was at home at either end of the spectrum, which accounts for his long, interesting career. Heard first wowed critics in his early 20s as an Obie-winning stage actor in New York, and quickly moved into film and television roles. He reeled off a string of memorable performances in the 1980s, including Cutter’s Way, Cat People, The Trip to Bountiful, Heaven Help Us, The Milagro Beanfield War, Big, Beaches, Mindwalk, Awakenings and The Pelican Brief. In 1990, he played Peter McCallister, the dad in Home Alone. Jenny Stewart knew John Heard for more than two decades. She reached out to John to get the story behind his role in Home Alone…and the unusual challenges he faced as one of the most recognized actors of his time

EDGE: When you got the script for Home Alone, did you have any idea that this was going to become such an iconic movie

JH: No. No idea

EDGE: Many people have pointed out that the premise is hard to swallow. Could a family board a plane for Europe and leave a child behind?

JH: That’s a good question. And that’s what Katherine O’Hara (above) and I had to ask ourselves. The two of us didn’t know. Between the two of us, she had the more difficult part. I could just be sort of a dummy, a goofy guy—I made him a gynecologist—I didn’t care, as long as she was as focused as she was in terms of losing our son. Then we learned that it was a comedy. Why is this funny?  How do we play this? We didn’t really know how comedic all that slapstick stuff was going to be until we saw it. It wasn’t until the second Home Alone that we knew that we could be funny.

EDGE: So you both were playing it straight?

JH: We were playing it straight. Or, we were given an opportunity by the director to be comedic—but not necessarily personally comedic or funny, not somebody making jokes

EDGE: Have you ever misplaced a child and felt that kind of panic and terror

JH: Sure. From the moment you have children you’re experiencing that. I can remember a time when I was in a little video store, a perfectly safe place, in Rhinebeck, New York. My son, Jack, was four or five. I was talking to the girl who ran the store with her mother, and I turned around and he wasn’t there. We were towards the back of the store, so there wasn’t any place for him to go. It was literally like he had disappeared. I flipped out. I’d taught him not to run around to try to find a parent if he became separated, to stand in the same place where he lost his parent—teaching him his phone numbers, stuff like that. I started racing around in a circle. “Jack! Jack!!” Somehow he had managed to blend in with the videotapes in the corner of the store; I didn’t see him. I hugged him. “Oh, my God, there you are!”  God, it was so horrible. I know the feeling, and it’s a really horrible feeling

EDGE: What do you remember from the set of Home Alone?

JH: Michael Jackson came to the set to see Macaulay Culkin. They were buddies. We were all getting into a van while we were shooting the ride to the airport, and I hit my head getting into the van. Someone took a picture of them standing in front of the van with me wearing the camel hair coat from the movie holding a hot water bottle on my head. I don’t know what happened to it

EDGE: You grew up in the Washington D.C. area. Do you consider that home

JH: That and New York City, I guess. I’ve spent an equal amount of time in each.

EDGE: What did your parents do?

JH: My father worked in the Pentagon. He was under assistant to the assistant to the under assistant to the Secretary of Defense. He was in charge of contracting and military appropriations. He was an engineer. On weekends, my father would go play his saxophone, which he loved dearly, and my mother would go and perform in a community theater play.

EDGE: Who got you into the theater as a young man?

JH: My mother, probably, and my sister, Cordis, who wanted to build a theater in our garage. My mother said to me, ”Why don’t you get out of the house and do something?” It was more of a threat that, if I didn’t, she would make life more difficult. The first show that I ever was in at the Chevy Chase Community Center was a show called The Happy Wanderer. The kid that was going to sing in the show got sick. He had one of those operatic voices at age 12. The lady that ran the group of us—she was very sweet, I had a crush on her—said to me, “All you have to do is walk around, John, and pretend like you’re singing…and we’ll play something.”

EDGE: Poor singing voice?

JH: Terrible. When I was in college, I did an operetta, and I only had one line to sing. I had a director who literally pulled his hair out every time I sang. And, he didn’t have much to pull out!  He was like, “Don’t you hear yourself?”

EDGE: How many roles have you had where you had to sing?

JH: None. Well, actually, I did a repeat role in The Sopranos and they called me up and said, “Tony’s going to have a dream return thing, like years later, and you have to sing around the table. It’s part of the dream that he’s having, and you‘re singing [sings] You’re once…twice…three times a lady. That’s one of the hardest songs in the world for anybody to sing!  So I called up David Chase, and said, “I’m not singing this. I can’t sing that song.” He said, “I never thought of that. It never occurred to me that you couldn’t sing.” Like it was all my fault. He didn’t change it, so I had to sing it. I had to take singing lessons for a week to sing even a note of it. And I had to sing it in front of Annette Bening and Jimmy Gandolfini, they were two people at the table. Annette was really nice. Gandolfini was always really funny. He said, “Wow, you sound a lot better off camera.” Annette Bening said, “Jimmy! Don’t be mean!” She was, like, give him a break. I never forgot how she stood up for me.

EDGE: One of your first movie roles was playing Jack Kerouac in the 1980 film Heart Beat along with Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek. What was it like stepping into such an iconic character

JH: It was scary because I’m not anything like him. I picked a certain time when Jack Kerouac had written Maggie Cassidy about his hometown in Lowell, Mass. I identified with that. I went to school at Clark University, which was in Worcester, and I knew from counties and dark New England nights and so on and so forth. Also, he was a member of a boy’s gang, he was Catholic, he was Canadian—French Quebecois. He had a rugged side.  He was poor, his mother looked out for him, I don’t remember if his father was around. But, he was a lot tougher than me. I was a little bit more effete, so I was worried that I was going to come off too bookish. Jack Kerouac seemed pretty downtrodden to me and he was such a heavy drinker. So I’d get into fights with the director, John Byrum, all the time. He’d say, “I don’t give a crap if it’s the real thing, just play the scene, stop being so glum.” 

EDGE: He was looking for a different Kerouac.

JH: This was a time in Kerouac’s life when Carolyn Cassidy and Neal Cassidy and he, I think, were having the most fun—riding around, both of them being in love with her, and her with them. They were being cutting edge, so that was what the movie was trying to show.  He didn’t want me to be Jack Kerouac in The Dark of Night. He used to take my girlfriend at the time, and put her on a ladder behind the camera, and surprise me so that she would make faces or something, shake her booty, so that I would perk up.

EDGE: What was it like off-set with Nick and Sissy?

JH: Sissy we didn’t see that much of; we scared her off very early on. She was like, “They’re going to throw me in the pool.”  Nick and I—and his friend Billy Cross—hung out every night and just drove L.A. We were up all night every night, and went from one end of L.A. to the other. Billy drove.  We’d pull into one house after another, 20 minutes apart, to see girls with their hair up in rollers, with their pajamas on, going [falsetto] ‘Hi, Nick!” with their face in their hands. Everybody loved Nick. I mean everybody loved Nick. Everywhere you went everyone loved Nick Nolte. He was great! He’s a great guy!

EDGE: He’s a man’s man.

JH: Yes.  He’s very much a man’s man.  All the stunt guys used to love him. We used to drink over at The River Bottom, and they would actually come in the back room and sit down in our booth to meet Nick and say hi to Nick. That’s a very rare thing for an actor; that was quite a tribute. With me, it was like “Who’s he?”   

EDGE: How did coming of age in the late 1960’s influence who you are?

JH: After college, I went to [grad school at] Catholic University to stay out of Vietnam.  It was a stupid decision, since they weren’t giving anybody deferments for going to grad school anymore. But, I tried anyway!  I thought that I’d get a master’s degree in theater drama. I’ll teach…that will be fun…I’ll be connected to the theater, get hooked up in some theater department somewhere in the United States and stay in that privileged world of academics. It was 1968, and I was graduated from college and I didn’t know what to do.  It was a time when everything was interconnected with an alternate lifestyle. 

EDGE: And?

JH: I realized that I had no ability whatsoever to write a masters thesis! But, Catholic U. had a touring theater company that traveled around the country performing plays for $80 a week.  My acting teacher said I could go. His actual words were, “Everyone else is in Vietnam, John, so yeah, you can go.” I guess you can say that’s when the “acting bug” hit. We drove everywhere—Iowa, Michigan, Georgia. Setting up the show, performing, breaking it down.  And, in between, we were getting into all sorts of trouble. It was a political time. It was a lifestyle. It was anti-government, anti-corporations. It was a great way of being in touch with everything that was going on in your lifetime at that age.

EDGE: Did you consider yourself a hippie?

JH: I didn’t have the guts to go the whole distance as a hippie. Friends of mine did. You have to remember that we were all supposed to go to Vietnam because of the draft.  Extreme things had to be done to stay out of going. Some guys tried to flunk the physical, or said they were crazy. I didn’t have to do any of that because of theater, I was lucky enough to work. 

EDGE: What should I add to my Netflix queue to see John Heard at his best?

JH: Everybody points to Cutter’s Way (above). I don’t know. That was another instance of me being not quite gritty enough. That’s what Billy, Nick’s friend, said. Maybe Big. Although Big is a little one-note. I wish I had done more in Big. I was just trying to get through the words and make them believable. Sometimes, you have to show up and remember to be creative, to come with something that’s not straightforward.  

EDGE: You were a bad guy in Big. Do you prefer playing the bad guy or do you like the funny, good guy roles?

JH: I would prefer to play the “theater of the absurd” guy—an Ionesco kind of a transition from World War II into the ’60’s kind of thing. Not-stand up humor. A humorous character with a point of view, but not trying to be funny. Playing a bad guy for me, that’s hard.

EDGE: How so?

JH: Because there is a tendency for me to become over-emotional, and most bad guys are great when they are emotionless. They’re straightforward, prepossessed and physically formidable. Look at Joe Pesci. He’s only—what?—five feet tall.  But every time Joe gets pissed he’s so wonderfully bad ass. And yet, at the same time, he’s the funniest guy in the world! You know when he did that thing about “What’s so funny about me?” in Goodfellas, well he did that to me one night in a hotel. He came in and I was standing at the front desk. He told me a story about some guy that kept bugging him. He kept saying [spot-on Joe Pesci imitation] “Don’t make me come ova dere, don’t make me come ova dere.” I think he was trying it out on me, because he ended up putting that in Home Alone, and it was hilarious. He has some kind of unique combination of talent, a voice and a physicality that he blends into one person. He’s engaging as a bad guy and that’s where I’d like to be. 

EDGE: Are you still having fun acting?

JH: Yes. I have a lot of fun. I like to have fun. I like to screw around and I like to be sort of a jerk, and give people a hard time, get people to leave me alone. They think that I’m some big grouch. But people forget that you’re standing there between takes and you’re thinking about what you’re going to do or what you’re going to say.  

EDGE: Are you interested in doing stage again?

JH: Yes, I love the stage. I love theater, its’ my first choice. I always think that I could be great on stage. I don’t know why. I think that’s the tradition of being on stage, you think you can be great. I don’t think you think that as much in movies. But, I think that about theater.

EDGE: Is that because of the energy you get from the audience?  

JH: Maybe. I just think traditionally every young actor thinks my Hamlet is going to be the greatest Hamlet!

Editor’s Note: John Heard passed away following back surgery on July 21 in Palo Alto. After turning off her recorder, Jenny Stewart asked John what his future plans were. His final words to her were, “Let the chips fall where they may.” Jenny had this to add: “Ironically, our interview started with us joking around about his inclusion in a celebrity death hoax scam that had gone viral. He humbly thought that he was being confused with the actor John Hurt, who had died in January. I offered that he, John Heard, was now part of an elite crowd of performers whose deaths were faked on social media. John was a contradiction of terms. He came from the Washington D.C. establishment, yet spoke—and sometimes acted—like a character from Easy Rider. He was gritty, yet mannered, dangerously funny yet hermetic in times of self-doubt. He initially wanted to take a safer path in life, but ended up on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, which brought him celebrity and, I hope, happiness.”

You will never see Joe Morton on one of those online lists of 10 Director’s Nightmares. He has the unique ability to blend seamlessly into an ensemble cast while simultaneously making every part his own. He commands attention and respect without chewing the scenery. He conveys nuanced emotion without uttering a word, yet when he speaks he can dramatically alter the pace and direction of a scene. Morton portrays good guys, bad guys, scientists and aliens with equal aplomb, which makes him one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actors. As CIA black ops boss Rowan Pope on ABC’s hit series Scandal, he gets to play one of the tastiest characters of his career. Robert Piper caught up with Morton in Los Angeles, three time zones away from his New Jersey home.

EDGE: Your character Rowan Pope on Scandal is the quintessential nightmare dad. You’ve played so many good guys over the years, is it kind of fun playing a bad guy?

JM: Absolutely! When I came out to LA, I was actually looking for a really smart bad guy and this guy literally fell into my lap. So, it was perfect timing on everybody’s part.

Sony Broadway

EDGE: You’ve actually played a number of complex dads over the years. What kind of dad did you grow up with?

JM: My father was an Army captain and his job was to integrate the armed forces overseas. That meant that he and his family sort of showed up at whatever army post he was sent to, racially unannounced. When we arrived, all [hell] sort of would break loose. It was rough wherever we were. So that was my model. That kind of discipline, that kind of strength, that kind of courage in a certain way. It’s kind of what Rowan Pope is endowed with.

EDGE: Did we see any of Joe Sr. in Lone Star?

JM: Oh, absolutely! My father died when I was 10, so I think that a lot of who I am as an adult is some sort of—“reflection” is not exactly the right word—but an “investigation” of who my father was.

Cinecom Pictures

EDGE: Lone Star was your third movie with John Sayles. Was there a New Jersey connection at that point?

JM: I moved to Jersey after The Brother from Another Planet. It was somewhere in the middle of all of that. But it wasn’t so much the Jersey connection. When we did The Brother, we sort of enjoyed working together. He’s very loyal to the actors that work with him. So he would invite many of us back.

EDGE: What do you feel distinguishes Sayles as a film maker?

JM: Well he’s a social “commentarian,” isn’t he? His movies aren’t simply about good guys and bad guys. They’re usually about workers in management, people sort of in their lives, having to work and deal with authority figures. So I think a lot of what his work is about is the common man dealing with the powers that be.

EDGE: What were the challenges working out your character, who was a mute alien, in The Brother from Another Planet?

JM: It was a lot of fun. Because he couldn’t speak, that sort of allowed me to use my whole body to express whatever it is that needed to be expressed, and just gave another dimension to the joy of that character in a way that I hadn’t found in other characters. Also, the idea of a black man who has tons of talents but no place to channel them at all because of his social and economical situation, who couldn’t move forward, is what I really loved about the script and about the character. I loved what John and I created in that movie.

EDGE: Earlier in your career, you had interesting roles in a sitcom, soap operas and on the stage. Who were the people who influenced your approach to acting during those times?

JM: Probably my teachers. I had some wonderful teachers at Hofstra University, including Carol Sica and Miriam Tulin. I probably didn’t start thinking about acting until I got to college. A lot of what they taught me—how to approach a character, what my investment in the story was, what I wanted essentially—was what I was using at that period of my life. And still today.

EDGE: What do you consider your first really good performance?

TriStar Pictures

JM: [Laughs] My first really good performance. Hmm. Well, it depends. On a professional level? The Brother from Another Planet is still my favorite film. I played Colin Powell on stage in Stuff Happens, which was an amazing experience.

EDGE: You’ve served as a narrator on a number of historical projects.  Are you a fan of history?

JM: I am, yes.

EDGE: You’ve also worked on dozens of TV series. Is there a moment that stands out as being particularly memorable?

JM: I did a series years ago called Equal Justice. Vanessa Bell Calloway played my wife or played my girlfriend in the series and she got killed. I’m a lawyer, the head prosecutor. I don’t necessarily try that case, but I find out later that the guy gets off, he gets away with it. There was a moment between Cotter Smith and me in an empty courtroom were he tells me what happened, and I sort of respond to it. That’s one of those moments where you’ve hit it and you know you’ve hit it. It felt really good.

EDGE: Is directing something you’d like to do more of?

JM: I would. I was hoping that Proof was going to carry on a bit longer. I was hoping to direct an episode or two of that. So yes, I would like to do more directing. I really enjoy it.

EDGE: Where do you go for “local flavor” when you’re home?

JM: I enjoy cooking, so I don’t go out to restaurants often. But when I don’t feel like cooking—or have just returned from traveling and just want to go out quickly to get something to eat—I tend to go to the Court Jester in Matawan. It’s near where I’m staying. It’s a cozy sports bar. I like the easy vibe of it.

EDGE: What is it that drew you to New Jersey?

Photo by Bobby Quillard

JM: Well, I was married and I had kids, young children at the time. Montclair, if it has an industry, it’s education—it has great public schools. So we found this house on a cul-de-sac, next to a park, with a red-leaf oak in front of the house. And that’s what drew us to New Jersey. It was a place that we could afford and it had great schools. It was this beautiful sort of diverse neighborhood, that had a park at the end of it, and that’s what got us there.

EDGE: What have you come to appreciate most about the Garden State?

JM: I think the thing that comes to mind always is that most people outside of New Jersey only think of what they see when they exit either tunnel on their way out of the city. What’s great about the Garden State is just that—that it is a garden state. It’s actually a beautiful state. There are areas of New Jersey that are just wonderfully attractive and beautiful, especially in the fall. It’s not the oil refineries or whatever is outside of the tunnels. People need to spend more time looking at the landscapes of New Jersey.

Editor’s Note: Robert Piper is a freelance writer based in Chicago. He has written extensively on the subject of meditation and has taught physicians, psychologists, physical therapists, athletes, and business professionals. Robert spent nine and half years studying with a Taoist monk until he received the title of Master. He is the author of the popular book Meditation Muscle.

Idol worship has come to New Jersey in the form of Jackie Cole, a spunky blond teenage chanteuse known to millions of music fans by her three-letter nickname, Jax. A native of East Brunswick, Jax powered her way to the finals of American Idol (Season 14) this spring, making it farther than any New Jersey singer in the show’s history. She is an original in every sense of the word—her look, her attitude and her voice—right down to the (non-permanent) trademark X on her left cheek. Tracey Smith caught Jax heading into the Final 3.

Somehow, she fell one round short of victory…but we suspect we’ll be hearing from her long after the two finalists have faded from memory.

EDGE: What kind of advice do American Idol contestants get from the judges?

JC: All three of the judges commented that I am an artistic person and to stay artistic and focus on being creative. The most inspiring advice was to stay in the moment, stay present, because you can lose yourself in a lot of other moments, instead of the one you’re actually in. In the performance, it’s important to stay in the moment.

EDGE: What goes through your head when you perform in front of millions of television viewers?

JC: It depends on the song. I often think of my parents and family members—because they’re sitting right in front of me!They are getting to watch the most incredible experience of my lifetime. Sometimes I’ll think about a guy, again, depending on the lyrics. A lot of times I’ll just think about myself.

EDGE: How far back can you trace your singing career?

JC: I have been singing since I was able to talk. And I was fortunate enough to have known my calling as an entertainer for a very long time—since I was the age of three. I’ve always wanted to sing. As far back as I can remember.

EDGE: What have your musical influences been?

Fox Broadcasting Network

JC: I love all kinds of music. When I say that, I really mean it. I love music from the 40’s and on! I think my number-one inspiration was probably Janis Joplin. It’s pretty cool to perform her songs.  I’m influenced by all women of power, like Joan Jett and Stevie Nicks, who I actually just saw live with Fleetwood Mac, which was insane. I like Gwen Stefani and No Doubt. I like Haley Williams a lot. And Lady Gaga. But I also like Billy Joel and Simon and Garfunkel. And whatever is new on pop radio. In terms of mentors, I have my vocal coach. He’s incredible. I go to vocal lessons once a week in the city. With the amount of singing I do, there is no choice but to keep going and improving.c

Fox Broadcasting Network

EDGE: Of the people the contestants worked with on the show, who were the most memorable?

JC: We learned something different from every one of them. I think that maybe the most enjoyment I got out of mentorship was with Kelly Clarkson, because she was a former contestant. There’s nobody who could relate to us any more than she could, in that sense. But yeah, everybody brought something different to the table. I loved Boy George, Florida Georgia Line, Nile Rodgers, everyone was really great. But Kelly Clarkson was truly the most relatable.

Fox Broadcasting Network

EDGE: As you move forward in the American Idol competition, how do you deal with the inevitable highs and lows?

JC: It’s not easy. It’s really important to find a balance between those things, because if you don’t, then you can wind up in either of those two dangerous extremes. For example, I try to stay away from comments in blogs for the most part, because if they’re really great or really awful, either way they are likely to affect my mindset.  It’s like when a football team thinks way ahead in the season and ruins the actual next game they have to play. That’s what I meant before about just having to stay in each moment.

EDGE: You know, there was a famous football coach named Bear Bryant who used to tell his players, “Show class, have pride, and display character—if you do, winning takes care of itself.”

JC: It’s true. You should be your own worst critic, you should compete with yourself and learn from your mistakes. It’s important to give off that kind of class. And I think it’s important to inspire people, to show the world that this is a beautiful thing, a beautiful process, and that however American Idol ends, we’re all just trying to leave our mark on this planet. Presenting yourself in that kind of way really shows the honesty of the process.

EDGE: And if you do win?

JC: The first thing I’m going to do is celebrate with my family and [laughs] go get some Taco Bell!

EDGE: You came into this competition as a Jersey Girl. Are you ready to spread your wings a little more?

JC: I love my hometown and New York and everything, but I want to travel. Part of my job and purpose is to touch people in as many places as I can. I am really ready to branch off.

EDGE: So have you named your first CD yet?

JC: The Undefined Variable with an X [laughs]. No, it would definitely be a pop record, but with more of a rock edge…something a little darker than your usual pop record. I want to make an honest pop record.

EDGE: What was it like to hear yourself on iTunes for the first time?

JC: It was surreal. It’s, like, people can actually pay for my recordings. I don’t even know how to feel about it. I actually bought my own recording on iTunes [laughs] and felt guilty about it. Then again, it’s really great to hear what we worked on in the studio.

What is it about northern New Jersey that produces so much show business talent? Is it a numbers game, as some claim, a result of so many people per square mile? Is it the restlessness engendered by urban sprawl, the need to move up and move out? Is it the nighttime skyline of New York City, twinkling in the distance, coaxing our hidden gems across the river? EDGE’s Gerry Strauss sat down with actor Jason Biggs to explore these questions, and to chart his course from child actor to movie franchise star to his most recent turn as a member of the spectacular ensemble cast of the Netflix hit Orange Is the New Black. What’s on the horizon for Biggs? Spoiler alert: It won’t be Guys and Dolls.

EDGE: From a career perspective, was there a benefit to growing up in Hasbrouck Heights, in terms of the proximity to New York? 

Photo by Linda Kallerus for Netflix.

JB: Without a doubt. In fact, if I had not grown up where I did, it stands to reason that I might never have gotten into show business at all. As it was, it was just eight miles between my house and Times Square. Our patience was tested plenty, fighting the rush hour traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel when I had an after-school audition. But had I lived any further away, I can’t imagine that working and auditioning in the city would have been plausible.

EDGE: Aside from the acting, was your childhood fairly typical?

JB: I played Little League baseball, Pop Warner football, and wrestled with the town recreational team. I rode my bike everywhere, swam in our pool during the humid summers, and shoveled snow for neighbors in the winter. We lived right under the flight paths for both Teterboro and Newark airports, and I would spend countless hours sitting outside, watching and identifying the planes overhead. In fact, I remain obsessed with aviation as an adult.

EDGE: How did acting find its way into the mix?

JB: My older sister, who is six years my senior, was in a dance group as a kid. Some of the other girls in the group started going into the city to try to get agents and attempt acting. My sister wanted to do the same. Our parents, thinking it could be both a fun hobby and a good way to save money for college, supported it and made it happen. When I was five, my sister’s then-manager called my mom and asked if I would want to audition for something. I did, and haven’t stopped since.

Photo by Ali Goldstein for Netflix.

EDGE: What role did your parents play in your evolution as an actor?

JB: My parents were instrumental in making it possible for me to act as a child. Logistically speaking, there was no way I could have done it without their services as chauffeurs and chaperones. But they never forced it on me—it was always my choice. They were very proud of my accomplishments as a kid, just as they are now.

EDGE: At 14, you were on Broadway with Judd Hirsch and Tony Shaloub in Conversations with My Father, and at 16 you were on As the World Turns. What did you carry forward from those early experiences as an actor?

JB: I like to think that every job I have helps prepare me for the next one. But daytime television certainly had its challenges and gave me important lessons to take into future jobs. For example, the filming schedule in daytime moves at a breakneck speed. As such, you need to be very capable when it comes to quickly and efficiently memorizing all of your lines. You don’t have much time for rehearsal. You really learn to focus and think quickly.

EDGE: You are so well known for the R-rated coming-of-age American Pie films, which continue to have an incredible following. What do you think the movie’s ultimate legacy will be?

JB: Well, it’s obviously somewhat difficult to be objective about something that I am so close to, and that is such an integral part of my life. But based on people’s reactions—and to the constantly changing demographic of the movie’s fans—I believe it will have great staying power. I look forward to helping many future generations of adolescents learn about the birds and the bees!

EDGE: On the flip side, playing the same character in a hit movie with three hit sequels is a risky proposition for anyone who thrives on playing diverse characters.  How important was it for you to pursue roles where people could see you differently than they knew you from American Pie?

JB: I’m always trying to change people’s perception of me, especially since that perception is pretty firmly attached to one role in particular. I know that I am a more complicated and multi-faceted person than I’ve been able to show in my roles, so of course I’m eager to share that. But really, the bigger point in trying to branch out is to keep things exciting for me and to continue to challenge myself by working outside my comfort zone. Ultimately, I’m grateful for any opportunity to work. This is a very fickle industry—one in which it is tough to find success, let alone maintain it.

EDGE: Was it tough to know that the world was basically watching you grow up?

JB: Truthfully, it wasn’t something I was aware of while it was happening. I’m more aware of it now though. Looking back at the footage, I can’t help but be struck by how young I look. It’s been over 15 years since the first American Pie. Of course, I thought I was such an adult then, but I obviously had so much still to learn.

Photo by K.C. Bailey for Netflix.

EDGE: Your body of work is eclectic, to say the least. From drama to comedy to voiceovers to small films. What do you look for in a role?

JB: I look for an opportunity to have fun, to challenge myself, and to work with great people. I’ve been very lucky in my career to have been able to move across different genres and different mediums, and work with people who I can learn a lot from. Ideally, every job will feel like it’s an organic next step in my career, one that will hopefully continue into the future.

EDGE: Your current show, Orange Is The New Black, is unique not just in terms of story and tone, but in the fact that it’s part of the Netflix library of original programming—with no actual presence on traditional broadcast or cable television. It sounds as if that uncharted aspect of the project might have been appealing.

JB: There is no question that a huge part of the appeal of the project was the fact that it would be streaming on Netflix. The entire television landscape has changed dramatically over the last few years. The way people consume their shows and movies is different. And Netflix is at the forefront of the movement to cater to these new demands. I feel like I’m part of something groundbreaking, something cutting-edge. It’s very cool.

EDGE: What’s different about shooting a series that’s released all at once, where people can binge watch or watch on their own schedule?

JB: What makes this model most unique—both because we shoot the whole season in its entirety and it is released in its entirety—is that it makes it more akin to a 13-hour movie, as opposed to a television show. This affects the actors on set and, as you point out, also the audience at home.

EDGE: Your character on the series, Larry Bloom, exists in real life. For you, is it more important to be accurate or entertaining?

JB: The show’s creator, Jenji Kohan, was clear from the beginning that we would be making our own show, one that could stand apart from the book and therefore from the real lives of the characters in it. It’s a necessity, really, since we are making a longer-form version of the original story—and therefore need to expand upon the original, both in storylines and ideas. So there was no real pressure on me to portray Larry in any other way than that which was dictated by the scripts. I never needed to do an “impression,” so to speak.

EDGE: Orange Is The New Black has such a talented ensemble, headed by Taylor Schilling (above left). Is there a hidden gem in the cast, one actor or performance that has really taken you by surprise?

JB: Well, it’s hard to single out one performance. This entire cast is pretty special. But the character of Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett has always been a favorite of mine. Taryn Manning’s portrayal is both hilarious and heartbreaking.

EDGE: What is your own hidden gem? If you could point EDGE readers to one performance you’re particularly proud of, which would it be?

MRB Productions/Votiv Films

JB: Grassroots is a film and performance I am particularly proud of. Not unlike Orange, it required a more subtle, grounded, and emotionally true performance. It’s a cool little film that represents for me a turn toward choosing more challenging and adult roles.

EDGE: Do you still maintain any connection to your old stomping grounds in Jersey?

JB: Very much so. My parents live in the same house I grew up in. My sister lives in Bogota. I’ve remained friends with a lot of my buddies from high school, some of whom still live in North Jersey as well. I try to get back a couple times a year, and I always make it to at least one Giants game each season. They’ll always be my team, no matter where I might live.

EDGE: What aspect of Jersey life have you clung to?

JB: Well, my dietary habits remain firmly tied to my Italian-American-North-Jersey upbringing. I love cooking pasta for early Sunday dinners, for example. And my accent is likely to make the occasional appearance, especially when I’m having a conversation with one of my family members or friends from home. My wife always points it out when that happens. Fortunately for me, she thinks it’s cute.

EDGE: You’ve done so many things already in your career, but what would you like to do that you’ve never done before?

JB: Tough question. It sounds trite, but I really want to try it all—except for the things I absolutely know for certain I will never be able to do. Like singing. So don’t expect to see me in Guys and Dolls anytime soon. And if you hear that I’m in a production of it, definitely don’t go see it. It will be a waste of your money. It’s good to know your limitations, I suppose.

When Princeton-educated F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there are no second acts in American lives, it is unlikely he imagined someone like Yale-educated Harry Hamlin. Like the figment of a talent agent’s imagination, Hamlin arrived on the entertainment scene in the late 1970s with a killer combination of easy charm, classic good looks, impeccable stage training and a knack for making parts his own. After reaching the apex of his profession in the 1980s, he backed out of the spotlight to raise his family. When Hamlin decided to get back into the game, his timing couldn’t have been better. Yet, as Editor-at-Large Tracey Smith discovered, when it came to landing the role of Jim Cutler in Mad Men, timing wasn’t everything.

EDGE: In 2014–15, you are a cast member of Mad Men and Shameless. They are wildly different shows. Are they wildly different sets?

HH: No. They’re both extremely professional. John Wells and Matt Weiner are two of the most accomplished and professional writer/show-runners that have ever existed. So you can imagine that everything is extremely well thought- out on both sets. There are very few differences, other than the fact that on the Shameless set you’re not allowed to have any sides. Sides are small versions of the script that are handed out every day, kind of a crib sheet for the actors. John Wells doesn’t permit them; he demands that the actors know all of their lines in advance.  Normally, the sides are right there in your dressing room and you look at them to find out what scene you’re doing first and what the order of the scenes is, and what words you may need to brush up on. In the car on the way over to the set from the studio, Emmy Rossum said, “You’d better know your lines—if you don’t, you’re in deep trouble with John Wells and he’ll never hire you again!” (laughs) So, it’s a good thing I knew my lines.

EDGE: How did your casting experience compare on the two shows?

HH: For Shameless, I was offered the role and didn’t need to read for it, or even meet John Wells. He obviously knew who I was. Matt Weiner has a policy where he meets everybody that comes on the show, and reads everybody that comes on the show. But he normally doesn’t cast anyone who has a profile. He likes actors to be somewhat known, but not really, really well known.  In my case, there have been times in my career when I have been really, really well known, but not so much lately, because I took some time off to raise my kids. Anyway, I was surprised to get the call from my agent to go in and meet Matt and read for a part they called “Swinger Boss” for Mad Men. They told me it would be a one- or two-episode part. I was a fan of Matt’s, and I loved the show, so I agreed to go in.

EDGE: But Matt obviously knew who you were.

Photo by Eiske Photography

HH: Yes. The casting directors told me later that they had to spirit me into the room by putting a fake name on the docket for Matt, because they wanted him to see me for this part—but they knew that if he saw my name on the docket he probably would say, “Wait a minute, what’s he doing here? I don’t see guys who are well known.” So as soon as I walked through the door, there wasn’t much Matt could do but say, “Oh. Hi. How are you? Welcome and let’s read the part.” So I read for the part…and didn’t get it. I was disappointed, because I wanted to work on Mad Men.  But a few months later, they called and offered me another part. They didn’t tell me it was Jim Cutler. They said it might go for two episodes, but definitely one. Once again, I said to myself, Well, I don’t really do just one episode, but then [my wife] Lisa said, “Come on! It’s Mad Men! You should go in and do it…maybe you could get Jon Hamm’s autograph!” (laughs) So I did. I went in, got the part, and it expanded and became what it has become now.

EDGE: Cutler seems like a deep pool, a pragmatist who plays everything close to the vest. What do you like about that part?

HH: I like that he’s quirky. It’s a chance to play a character that’s somewhat eccentric or a little bit off. I saw Jim being at somewhat of an angle to reality—not exactly a right angle to reality, but maybe thirty degrees off. In my opinion, he has potentially another secret life that has not been revealed. They gave me a lot of latitude to create the character that I wanted to create. I had to say the words they gave me, but when it came to my behavior, they kind of let me loose.

EDGE: Do we see any Harry Hamlin in Jim Cutler?

HH: No. The rhythm and how he holds his body, I don’t do that at all in life. I actually used my 10th Grade Latin teacher as a kind of a template. I remember him being pretty tightly wound.

EDGE: How would you characterize the quality of the writing on Mad Men?

HH: Every single word is well thought out—the choice of every comma, every single nuance of the language. There’s nothing there by accident, and there’s nothing there that hasn’t been embedded over and over again to make sure that the cadence that the actors deliver is exactly the cadence that they want to hear. Oftentimes, narrative dialogue is very right-on-the-money; it’s not how people actually speak. In Mad Men, they have integrated spontaneity into the dialogue.

EDGE: You mentioned taking time off to raise your children. What was behind that decision?

HH: I deliberately stepped back from the business when my new flock of kids was born. The hours that we keep on TV shows just do not jibe with raising a family, and with films you’re going on location all the time. It was the late 1990s and the business essentially left L.A. right about the same time the kids were born. You’ll recall that the Canadian dollar went way down, and incentives began to be put into place in different states; Hollywood ceased to be Hollywood about fifteen years ago.  When that happened, I said to Lisa, “I’m going to keep working, but I’m only going to work here in L.A. because I want to put these kids to bed every night. We’re going to have to figure out a way to make ends meet and make our lives work with that arrangement.” I already had a son and didn’t get a chance to spend any time with him, because he grew up in Rome and I was working all the time. I was devastated by that, and am to this day. You don’t want to have kids and not be there with them growing up. The most important thing in life is the legacy one leaves with their children. The ability to raise a solid family and be part of it, I think, is the greatest effort that we can make in life. So, I just said, “You know what? We’ll figure something out. I’ll write a book or I’ll do some reality TV, or we’ll do whatever is required to stay in town so that we can put our kids to bed every night.”

EDGE: And it worked.

HH: It did. We were able to do it. Lisa and I both worked and kept the fire going. Then, when the kids were old enough, around 13 or 14, I said, “It’s time now for me to go back to work.” I called my agent and said, “Let’s see what we can find.” Veronica Mars shot here, so I could do that. Army Wives shot in South Carolina. By then, though, I could leave for a while. Curb Your Enthusiasm came up and that was a lucky stroke. Then Shameless came up and people liked that, and then I got Mad Men. I have been very fortunate that things have worked out as well as they have.

EDGE: Final question…Perseus 1981 or Perseus 2010—which Clash of the Titans am I renting tonight?

Warner Bros

HH: Well it had better be 1981! (laughs) Little known fact about Clash of the Titans that Matt Weiner revealed to me on my first day working on Mad Men. They were in the process of casting Jim Cutler and Matt’s 13-year-old son was having a bunch of guys over for a sleepover birthday party. He told his son he could rent any movie he wanted and watch it in the screening room, and his son picked my version of Clash of the Titans. Matt said, “You were on my mind two weeks ago when my son asked to have this movie screened at the house.” That’s 30-some years after this film was made. That a kid would still ask to have that movie screened at his birthday party, I was amazed by that. I don’t know whether that had anything to do with his decision to cast me for the role, but that was something he told me my first day working with him.

EDGE: What do you recall about Clash of the Titans?

HH: Well, we kind of skewered the mythology a little bit. At Yale, I wrote my thesis on Myth and Drama. When I got the script for Clash of the Titans many years later, I noticed that the story was all screwed up. Perseus never rode a Pegasus in the original myth. Also, about three-quarters of the way through filming in Malta, they informed me that I would not be cutting off Medusa’s head with a sword. They had been told by the studio in London that the movie might get an X rating for violence, so I couldn’t do it. I said, “If that’s the case, you’re going to have to find somebody else to finish the movie because I’m going back to Los Angeles tonight.” They totally freaked out. They locked me in my trailer and unplugged the electricity. I still refused to do the shot. “You’ve screwed up the mythology so much in this movie—and now you want me to cut Medusa’s head off with my shield? Like a Frisbee? I’m not gonna do it!”

EDGE: You won that one.

HH: Yes, I did.

Editor’s Note: Tracey Smith took Harry Hamlin back to his days as a teenager and 20-something, and also quizzed him on his starring role on L.A. Law. Log onto edgemagonline.com to read more of their Q&A.

Photo by NBCUniversal/Heidi Gutman

The entertainment industry is full of people who play Mr. Nice Guy. The list of stars who actually are nice is considerably shorter. If Harry Connick, Jr. wanted to be a jerk, he could probably pull it off. He has the money, talent, work ethic and show biz instincts to live by his own set of rules and torture the folks around him—and still make his fans believe he’s their pal. That Connick is, by all accounts, one of the true sweethearts in the business makes his sustained stardom all the more remarkable. Since his breakthrough as a virtuoso musician and Sinatra-caliber crooner in the 1980s, he has conquered film and television as both a dramatic and comic actor, connected with Reality TV audiences as himself on American Idol, and used his fame to make a difference in the actual reality of his beloved New Orleans. Now Connick is leaving his imprint on the daytime talk space—to rave reviews—with Harry, and also revisiting his iconic role in NBC’s reboot of Will & Grace. As Gerry Strauss discovered, when Connick decides to tackle a new project, there is little doubt about the outcome. The NFL Saints will be looking for a new quarterback one of these days. Do you think…nah.   

Enigma Productions/Warner Bros.

EDGE: What aspects of stardom are most rewarding for you?Creative freedom? Being able to make a difference in other people’s lives? Doing right by your family?  

HC: I’d say the first two things are probably a tie. I mean, creative freedom is way up there, only because all I really want to do is try to function artistically on as high a level as I can. Success gives you the ability to do that. I get to work with great musicians, and I have the facilities that I need to improve. It’s like a chemist. If he’s successful, he gets to have a great lab to work in and that expedites the creative process, so that helps immensely. The ability to be heard is important, too, especially in times when your voice can make a difference. I think back to times when, had I not had a public platform upon which to stand, I would not have been able to do things like start the Crew of Orpheus, which was the first multi-racial, multi-gender major Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. Or start the Musician’s Village, which is an incredible project that Branford Marsalis and I started. Or be of some help during Hurricane Katrina. Those are all things that I was able to do as a result of being in the public eye, so I think it’s a tie between that and creative freedom.  

EDGE: From whom did you learn the most during your music career? 

HC: Probably Ellis Marsalis. He was my teacher back in high school. I probably spent the most hours with him, if you were to count up all the hours I’ve ever spent with everybody, because I was with him every day for four years. Ellis taught me things that I still use to this day, and if anyone were to be credited for having the biggest influence on my playing, it would be Ellis.

EDGE: Given the state of Jazz in the 80’s, how secure were you in the belief that you’d have a real shot at carving out a lucrative career for yourself? 

HC: Well, it’s like when you’re a kid and you look at yourself in the mirror, and you look at your family. If you’re around people that kind of eat the same food, and talk like you, and look like you…that’s your norm. Jazz music was my norm. It’s who I was. I never thought about it as being a risk. It’s just who I was. So when I moved to New York, I didn’t even think about playing any other kind of music, because that’s the music that I knew. When you believe in yourself—and you have a little bit of confidence and a drive to be known in this industry—the last thing you’re thinking about is Oh my gosh, I hope I’m making the right decision. All I wanted to do was play music, and at that time all I was doing was playing piano and singing, and I was playing jazz music, and I loved it. It was just something that I had to do. I felt compelled to do it because I loved it so much. 

EDGE: At 25 years old, you released one of the most enduring holiday albums ever, When My Heart Finds Christmas. Did you have any idea that this album would stand the test of time and become an all-time classic?

HC: It’s just such a humbling feeling to know that that record has been a part of so many people’s lives around the holidays. I never really think about whether things are going to endure or not. All I can do is try to make the best record, or best TV show that I can. You never know how people are going to respond to it, and the fact that it’s stuck around for so long is just a thrill. I worked just as hard on that album as I did on all of them. I’m thankful I did it, and I always enjoy playing those songs around Christmas time. 

EDGE: You seem equally comfortable on stage or in the studio. Do you consider yourself more of a recording artist who plays live shows, or a live performer who occasionally records? 

HC: I think it’s too hard to define. I mean, I’m a live performer for sure. But I also relish the time I have in the studio. It’s really hard to pull those two things apart. I’m probably equal parts live performer, and equal parts recording artist.

EDGE: You’re obviously comfortable in front of the camera. Has that always been the case?

HC: I’ve always loved being in front of the camera. I started doing public appearances at a really young age—probably six or seven years old—and started making records at nine years old, and being on TV and stuff since I was a kid. So the idea of that was always really familiar to me. I’m not a snow skier. I’ve gone a dozen times or so, but I’m terrible, and when I get off the lift I’m always nervous, because I don’t have the skillset to guarantee myself that I’m gonna be able to make it down safely. And you see these little kids out there doing it with no problem. It’s the same kind of thing. Some people say, “Well, how do you go up in front of all those people and perform on Broadway?” It’s just what I do. I’ve done it for so long. I just feel very comfortable being on stage and in front of the camera.

EDGE: Do you have a favorite genre in terms of acting? 

HC: I like whatever I’m doing at the time. When I’m doing Broadway, I love that because I’m very, very focused. When I’m doing Will & Grace or another sitcom, it’s the same type of thing. All I think about is the moment. The fun thing about doing Harry is that, although I get to do different things under the same roof, it’s still its own skillset—hosting a daily syndicated television show—so I’m focused on that, and all of the things that I have to do to try to make that show as good as I can. Like, right now I’m in “TV Show” mode, and I’m just loving every second of it. Whatever I’m doing at the time, I think, is what I enjoy the most. 

EDGE: To what do you attribute your success beyond your music career?

HC: I think it starts with believing in yourself, and believing that what you have to offer is something that other people might like. And working really, really hard at it. I have a work ethic second to none, and you can say what you want about my talent or lack thereof, but you’re not gonna find many people who work harder than I do. 

EDGE: Why is that?

HC: I genuinely appreciate the opportunity to do it. One of the things I get asked a lot is, “How are you doing with the grind of daytime?” I can’t get over that. It’s not a grind to me! Every day I wake up, and I’m thankful to be there. Do I have days where I’m tired or sick? Of course. But I’m fortunate to be here, and I’m going to give these people one hundred percent of myself every single time. I think those things probably have something to do with the success I’ve been able to achieve. 

HC Productions/NBC Universal Television

EDGE: What intrigued you about having your own talk show?

HC: Well, I love to perform and I love to be with people. I’ve been inspired by amazing women my entire life, I continue to be, and I wanted to do a show that I thought might have its own lane—a daytime show with music that celebrated everyday people and wasn’t about gossip or politics. It was about acknowledging incredible people for what they’ve done, having the occasional celebrity come on and share their story, and just doing a show that made people feel good. You never know if the thing’s gonna work…or if anybody’ll even buy it. But they bought it, and we were lucky enough to get five Emmy nominations the first season out. These shows rarely get picked up, and the fact that we got picked up for Season Two with a continually growing audience sends a very clear message to me that maybe our hunch was right. Maybe people want to watch a show that is wholesome, that you can watch with your whole family, but which is trying to be a show on a high artistic level, too. Those are all the reasons that made me want to do it. 

EDGE: What went into shaping the vibe and format? 

HC: Well, the last thing I wanted to do is plug myself into an existing formula. You see a lot of the same type of daytime shows on TV. Some of them are great. The host comes out, there’s a monologue, there’s a celebrity guest, there’s another celebrity guest, there’s another celebrity guest, and people do that really well. I didn’t want to do that because I’m not a “talk show host.” I wanted to do more of an experience that everybody kind of celebrates together. So I built everything based on my skillset, which is music, entertainment, and things I love to do.  

EDGE: For example? 

HC: I like to go in my audience all the time..we play live music on daytime television—we’re the only people who do that. I’m the only host that writes the music for the band. I did things that I knew how to do and, again, you never know if it’s gonna work. But I think people know that I’m sincere. Regardless of your feelings toward me, or what I have to offer, I think one thing that’s undeniable is that I absolutely love doing it, and I’m honored to do it, and every day when people come in I just feel blessed to be able to perform for them. Hopefully those things come across, and show people that they have a choice when they watch daytime. 

EDGE: What’s been your favorite part of doing Harry? 

HC: Meeting the women I call “Leading Ladies.” That was the first idea I had for the show. Fine, amazing women that I can talk to and that can inspire other people. Just yesterday, we filmed the captain of the ferry in New York that was one of the first responders when Miracle on the Hudson took place. I think she’s the only female ferry captain. Certainly she was the first one, and she just went into autodrive and saved dozens of people. This woman is amazing, and I said, “What do you have to tell young women out there?” She says, “Believe in yourself.” These are messages that we can’t hear enough—especially young women who I think struggle with self-esteem. Young boys do, too. But it’s tough out there for young girls. I have three daughters, and I’m aware of that, so I love having strong women. That’s my favorite part of the show.