The Hollywood Reporter has gone and done their annual Emmy Roundtable, and this month’s edition features the leading ladies of the most-talked-about shows on television. Claire Danes, Emmy Rossum, Kyra Sedgwick, January Jones, Julianne Marguiles, and Mireille Enos all sat down for an interview and a pretty photo shoot (the pretty photo shoot was my favorite, no surprise there). This is what they had to say about their careers and their respective shows.
“When I started Homeland, it had been God knows how long since I’d last done an episodic show. I was 14, 15 when I did My So-Called Life. And Homeland is just so dense. The volume of material that you have to commit to memory is overwhelming … [Also], I don’t love stripping down, but I also don’t love the idea of being kind of coy or prudish for the sake of it.”
“When I got on set – I’d never done nudity before – I was like, ‘Oh, everyone here is human.’ Some days you feel like, ‘Oh, God. I wish we were shooting this last week, I felt so skinny.’”
Shut up, Emmy Rossum.
“I started this season of Mad Men eight months pregnant, and I finished it with a 5-month-old [son Xander]. It was bizarre. And I was in seven hours of prosthetics every morning, trying to rip off a fake chest piece so I could breastfeed. I loved [the fat suit]. When Mad Men started, my character had a bunch of monologues because she was in therapy, but the therapist never spoke. I had no exercise to try to help me with that. So I recorded myself saying stuff and then listened to it while I slept, hoping that it would stick like a bad song. And it worked!”
Julianna Margulies for ‘The Good Wife’:
“In what we do with episodic work, it’s a nonstop train. I mean, there are days when, I was saying this to Kyra before, I had worked until midnight and then I had to go and shoot something else at five in the morning. I looked at my husband and I was like, ‘This is why Judy Garland was on pills. I can’t keep this up. I need a pill!’”
Kyra Sedgwick for ‘The Closer’:
“He [husband Kevin Bacon] was the one who supported my doing The Closer. It was a huge commitment and life-changing thing for both of us. We always read each other’s scripts; he often follows my advice, and sometimes I’m wrong, but he’s not. And I’m so grateful we have that, I really am. … I really want to do more films. I would like to do other characters for a shorter amount of time. But the TV experience was amazing, and it afforded me the experience of delving into a character and growing with her.”
Mireille Enos for ‘The Killing’:
“Is it wrong to admit that having to kiss Brad Pitt was very, very terrifying? It was [in] World War Z, which I shot last summer and it was the second day of shooting.”
So these are your Emmy ladies. And I’ll be honest when I say that I’ve seen all of these shows with the exception of the much-talked-about ‘Homeland’, but after hearing a lot of you guys talk about it, I think I know what I’m doing this weekend. YAY FOR TIVO.
Who’s your favorite leading lady for an Emmy? Check out the gallery for individual portraits.
Great man!!!