"It was a ghastly little room," says McCormack, who plays a scheming Tennessee senator with presidential aspirations four floors below in Gore Vidal's The Best Man. (His run ends Sunday.)
"I made this into something," says McCormack, 49, relaxing among the flotsam and jetsam of life in the footlights: opening night congratulatory cards, boxes of chocolate truffles, a bottle of Scope. "You want to be comfortable."
Of course, McCormack is quite comfortable in that other medium, TV, which catapulted him to fame 14 years ago with Will Grace and which he revisits Monday with TNT's Perception (10 p.m. ET/PT). If successful, the new crime drama could change (or at least broaden) the public's perception of McCormack fr om, as he puts it, "nice gay guy" lawyer Will Truman and Best Man's unsavory Southern politician Joseph Cantwell. His Perception character, brilliant neuroscience professor-cum-FBI case cracker Daniel Pierce, is the smartest guy in the room "crippled by the very thing that makes him the smartest guy in the room": paranoid schizophrenia.
"I wasn't necessarily looking to solve crimes, but I was looking to be somebody really interesting and complicated, sometimes funny, sometimes dramatic," often self-deprecating, says McCormack, urban casual in black boots, dark jeans and a gray shirt. "The idea that someone with that kind of a brain could be hampered by his brain at the same time was, I thought, a great character."
And if Perception happens to nudge people's perception of mental illness further from its stigma, it's a welcome byproduct. "We didn't, with Will Grace, set out to change the gay world. We just set out to be funny." But he "couldn't be prouder" of that show's "double legacy": The comedy holds up, and â€" as Joe Biden revealed when he endorsed gay marriage on Meet the Press in May and gave Will Grace a shout-out â€" it's still relevant.
And yes, McCormack is still close to his former small-screen best friend: He and Debra Messing had dinner not long ago and engaged in a bit of "Will and Grace-y banter" last week for a charity event.
"I'm delighted that Will Truman wil l be my epitaph, but as an actor, I have to challenge myself. I have to challenge the audience," he says. "You have to take the risk" while acknowledging that Will will forever be a part of his DNA. At the Best Man stage door, "one woman one night said (his voice rises into a nasal Noo Yawk honk), 'You were amazing, but I think I like you better gay.' "
McCormack readily concedes that Perception joins a growing genre: "slightly damaged lead characters that one way or the other are solving mysteries" (think Monk, House, Dexter, Homeland). "I'm kind of hoping that even if some of the critics are critical because it's a familiar structure, I think the character's unique."
Besides, he adds, there's room in the imperfect hero pantheon. "Monk's gone, and House is gone. Maybe I can pick up where they left off."
McCormack's last post-Will Grace show, another TNT drama, 2009's Trust Me, attracted good reviews but relatively few eyeballs, which, he admits, puts pressure on him regarding this project "for sure. … Do you have nine lives, or do you only have three?"
His critically lauded turn as Cantwell no doubt guarantees him an extra professional life. "I'm loving that right now, it's probably in my bones more than any play that I've ever done," says McCormack, standing on the cream-carpeted floor of Cantwell's set, a circa-1960 hotel room during the presidential nominating convention, outfitted with rotary phones and crystal ashtrays. It's about an hour to showtime, and the crew is banging away in the background while The Stars and Stripes Forever is pumped through the nearly century-old theater.
"That's an amazing feeling, to walk onstage, and you're not thinking about anything, you're not thinking about your lines or what you're supposed to do â€" your body, your brain knows, so there's freedom. There's not fear, there's not nerves."
Not that it hasn't been tough in this six-month home far away from his homes in Los Angeles and Vancouver (McCormack is a dual American-Canadian citizen) â€" not to mention his wife of nearly 15 years, Janet Holden, a former assistant director, and their son, Finnigan, 10. FaceTime was "definitely our friend."
But even after all those dressing-room renovations, the theater began to feel more homey last month, when Holden and Finn visited for a week. Finn came to the theater every night to soak in snippets of the show from the wings. "He's wearing this newsboy cap," McCormack recall s, "and he just looked like a stagehand from 1945."
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar