Cynthia Nixon
Were you familiar with David Lindsay-Abaire's work: Wonder of the World—which Sarah Jessica Parker starred in—or his other stuff at Manhattan Theater Club, Fuddy Meers and Kimberly Akimbo?
I had seen his other plays. I didn't see Kimberly Akimbo, which I'm still kicking myself about. And also my kids love Robotz.
I had forgotten he wrote that movie! Well, based on his previous plays, I was expecting something entirely different. Something really quirky.
Everyone is. Particularly our very early audiences. I think now people have heard more about it, but my friends who came said, “We kept waiting for it to turn wacky and it doesn't.” It has its very funny moments but it's very straight.
Being a mother yourself, I thought it must be hard for you to play someone who's lost a child. But then, I thought, perhaps only someone who's a mother could truly understand the character.
I feel that too. You know, the closer you are to the situation—obviously, if you had lost a child you'd be even more equipped to play it. But I think certainly having a child and knowing what it's like helps. And, you know, John Slattery and I both have little boys who are very close in age to the boy in the play. He has a 5 year old and I have a 3 year old, and the boy in the play is 4.
You had been rumored for other shows—Talley's Folley, for one. Why did you settle on this particular play?
It's always exciting to get to do a new play. Dan Sullivan was certainly a real enhancement; I've worked with him before and I'm always knocked out by everything I see that he does. He seemed to be so much the right person for this play. He has such an attention to detail.
So what's been going on with Drama Dept., your wonderful off-Broadway theater troupe? Anything coming up?
Have you had a chance to see DD member Douglas Carter Beane's The Little Dog Laughed?
You've actually done two of his plays: As Bees in Honey Drown and The Country Club.
I'd love to talk about some of your previous stage work. You've had the opportunity to appear in some incredible plays—like Hurlyburly and The Real Thing at the same time. I can't believe you got to do two such amazing shows at once—running back and forth between theaters.
They were both big hits.
Did you see Scott Elliott's revival last season for the New Group?
How good was Josh Hamilton?! He's one of my very favorite stage actors.
Speaking of Sex and the City, how funny is it that you took over for your future co-star Sarah Jessica Parker in the original production of The Heidi Chronicles?
So you were there when Wendy Wasserstein won the Pulitzer Prize.
It's like that story she told about opening night of The Sisters Rosensweig. They were at the post-show party, and someone commented how nice it was, and her mother, Lola, said, “Yes, but wouldn't it be nicer if this were Wendy's wedding?”
I've talked to a few people since her passing, and everyone has described her the same way: a wonderfully warm, genuine person.
Did you know at the time what an important play it was, or how important it would become?
Then you went on to do another history-making play, Angels in America.
Then so many people discovered it later, or rediscovered it, via Mike Nichols' made-for-HBO version.
Dan had quite a good day this week. He got an Oscar nomination for his screenplay, and Capote got five nominations including Best Picture.
You had quite the awards-show run recently—nominated for an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and a SAG Award for the HBO movie Warm Springs and your portrayal of Eleanor Roosevelt.
It was the year of S. Epatha Merkerson and Lackawanna Blues.
What made you pick Warm Springs for your big post–Sex and the City project? You must have had a lot of options.
And you definitely managed to avoid being pigeonholed. Eleanor is a pretty far cry from your SATC alter ego, Miranda.
So do you ever watch Sex and the City?
You should buy her the Collector's Edition DVD set with all six seasons.
I have to say--you've handled all the media attention of this past year so well. There was like a mini-scandal it was first revealed that you and Christine were a couple.
I chalked it up to the Sex and the City syndrome. People thought of you as Miranda, and Miranda dated men and married a guy in the end.
Chasing people, cutting them off...
You can keep a pretty low profile.
You sound like someone who's never going to leave New York.
You're turning 40—how are you feeling about that?
Are you going to make a big to-do?
Well, a great new Broadway play, terrific audiences night after night—that seems like a pretty good 40th birthday gift.
See Cynthia Nixon in Rabbit Hole at the Biltmore Theatre, 261 West 47th Street. Click for tickets and more information.
[His direction] is very, very spare and you're walking such a fine line of humor and pathos and repression and expression of grief. You could just walk around crying and yelling the whole time but that's the opposite of what it's really about. It's people who are trying not to get sucked under by their emotions. They're fighting so hard against them that at different points when emotion breaks through it's a relief. Humor is one kind of a relief, but people finally getting to have their emotional moments is a real relief.
I can't say that there is. Mostly in the last few years I've been doing benefits for them. We had some financial troubles, so we've been beating the bushes for money.
It's wonderful. It's very funny.
I'm such a fan of his writing. I don't want to say he's getting better all the time because certainly his plays in the past have been amazing. But this is such a personal play for him and so outrageous at the same time. There's so much of his thought and experience but also so much theatricality. I like when he has that kind of split-screen—four characters in four different places expressing their interior monologues.
You actually can't do it anymore; there is actually an Equity rule against it. The condition that Equity made at the time was that they would have to hire two understudies so that I wouldn't technically be putting an actor out of work. But even that they finally decided was not good enough.
They were like the boffo hits--both of them in one season. And they're very different: Real Thing was a far more... It's a painful play, but it's far more commercial and palatable whereas Hurlyburly was really dark and more experimental. I think The Real Thing had legs in a way that Hurlyburly didn't because it was too upsetting for people. Once the big stars [like William Hurt] left Hurlyburly people didn't want to take that journey.
It was great. Ethan Hawke and Josh Hamilton--I thought it was just great. People felt it was very different from our production but I didn't think it was so different. I thought the play holds up so well.
I've worked with him more than almost anyone else. We've done a million readings and a number of plays together, and then he got to be my phone sex guy on Sex and the City.
I replaced her like two weeks before they closed at Playwrights Horizons. They were going to move to Broadway and she had a movie or something.
Wendy came to the theater that night and she came out on stage and she took a bow. I remember--she won the Pulitzer but someone in her family got it wrong. They were like, “Did you hear Wendy won the Nobel Peace Prize?”
Oh my god.
So warm. So funny. And you know the thing that always struck me about Wendy? When I met her doing Heidi I was like 22, and she was always so interested in getting to know younger women. She really wanted to understand. The Heidi Chronicles is so much about that. We made all these sacrifices, we thought all this stuff was important--what was the next generation going to do. She was so interested in women's experiences, particularly the single women. Were we right, were we wrong, what are they doing with this gift we gave them? Third perfectly shows that. She really was interested in the younger generation and what they're thinking because she worries about her revolution and what's going to happen to it. She wanted to know what the future's going to be. And she was very political but with such a light-handed, humorous touch--not didactic, it wasn't propaganda.
I think we did. Certainly winning the Pulitzer was an affirmation; but it was one of the first things that I ever saw or read that was really like kind of a cry for help within the feminist movement. “I thought we were all in this together—what's happening?”
Right. “Who are these female sharks that have shown up out of nowhere that are just determined to be cutthroat business women and mothers and why do they think women like me who aren't married are chumps? I thought we were marching together. What happened? What happened to he solidarity? I didn't make these sacrifices so they could look down one me.”
Oh my god, yes, oh my god. There was nothing bigger. Oh my god. I had auditioned for it the first time around and they cast Marcia Gay Harden, but when the time came to replace her I was first in line, like, “Let me do it! Let me do it!” It was just totally amazing. You were in this tremendous work of writing but it was also Stephen Spinella bursting forth upon the world and Jeffrey Wright and Kathy Chalfant. And it was such an emblem, such a sign of where the gay movement had come. That there was a play on Broadway that dealt with all these things--gay sex in central park and AIDS and Reagan and Roy Cohn. And never mind all the poetry! Even if it didn't have all the political stuff just to have a play that's that poetic and that weighty on Broadway was amazing.
I thought the movie was just so fantastic. And—this is silly, but I was in Angels with Dan Futterman, who wrote Capote. I was first in it with Joe Mantello, and Dan replaced him. Plus I've known Justin Kirk [who starred in the HBO version] for years. So I was at the Golden Globes recently and I was trying to find Dan to congratulate him. I saw Justin there and I said, “Where's Futterman? Where's Futterman?” I thought me and Dan and Justin were all in Angels together; of course, I had seen Justin in Angels. [Laughs.] It's like one big Angels family.
Oh, that's cool. That's so cool.
[Good-naturedly] Well, I didn't win anything.
And you cannot argue with that.
I find myself in a conundrum all the time because lovely interviewers like you say things like that and I want to let you go along believing that. Certainly, I would have done Warm Springs no matter what else I was being offered. It's a tremendous script, it's a tremendous story; acting opposite Kenneth Branagh and Jane Alexander. Who wouldn't want to do that? But it's not like, "Which film shall I take the leading lady role in? Which of these five?" [Laughs] I'm lucky that I got offered this one and that it was such a great one. As actors, we take the best thing that we're offered and best could mean any number of things—the best script, best director, most money. We have a finite number of things that we're offered and we try to navigate that the best we can.
I gotta feel like Eleanor Roosevelt was about as anti-Miranda as you can get. I guess I don't want to do things that strike me as very Miranda.
I don't have a TV in my house. I love watching the show; I haven't seen it in quite a while now. My girlfriend hasn't seen all of them, so one of these days we'll pull them out.
[Laughs.] We've got other things that are more pressing to see than all of my unseen Sex and the City.
It's been okay. It was a little creepy when it first erupted. I had reporters and photographers outside my home. My girlfriend had British journalists on her parents' lawn. Everybody she ever went to high school with came out... It was a little crazy. It calmed down pretty fast, which was good. The thing is, they ask you the question, you say yes, and what more is there to say? Unless they find out that she's an international jewel thief. [Laughs.]
They were saying all these crazy things like, “Miranda's not the gay one—Samantha's the gay one!” “But I don't understand—Miranda kissed a girl and she didn't like it.”
I think that's true. I guess in L.A. [journalists] are doing all those crazy thing with cars.
I think it's much easier to be ambushed if you're not in a car. You are kind of a sitting duck if you're on the street with your kids. But I think New Yorkers are far more blase. My experience has been the more chichi the place—the fancier the restaurant or the more upscale the neighborhood—the more you get noticed. If you're on the Amsterdam bus as I am right now...
Right.
I hope not. I've made it all these years—almost 30 years. I started acting when I was 12 and I'm 40 this year. So far I've never had to relocate.
I'm feeling pretty good about it.
I can't say that I have given any thought to it. I'm not generally a big party thrower. It is a big one, though.
There was a moment last night on stage when I start to cry and then I say to [Jason Gallagher Jr.'s character], “So did you have fun at the prom?” And he says, “It was okay.” Sometimes that gets a laugh, which is fine—people are trying to pull it together; it's funny in a sad way—and I heard a woman very near the front. I thought she started to laugh, and then I realized she was sobbing out loud. I have to say, we were warned—oh, Tuesday nights, audiences are not really [great]—but the laughter has been really strong, they have been so attentive; there are so many moments when you could hear a pin drop. We have not had even a mediocre audience.