Jennifer Westfeldt on Her Burning Stage Role and Mad Romance
Almost every performer these days is said to be “versatile,” but in Jennifer Westfeldt’s case, it’s practically an understatement. Having begun her career in the theater, Westfeldt nabbed a 2004 Tony nomination for playing Donna Murphy’s sister in the Broadway revival of Wonderful Town. She’s been featured in TV comedies (Notes from the Underbelly; Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place) and dramas (an arc as a pregnant brain tumor victim on Grey’s Anatomy; a forthcoming role as a reporter on 24). She has written, produced and starred in two feature films (Kissing Jessica Stein, Ira & Abby) and is developing more movies through a production company she’s formed with her sweetheart of 12 years, Mad Men star Jon Hamm. Now Westfeldt's back on the New York stage for the first time in five years, starring in Cusi Cram’s A Lifetime Burning at Primary Stages. It’s a juicy part: Emma, a charming manic-depressive, has written a memoir that turns out to be fictional. And yet this ripped-from-the-headlines plotline is only part of the 90-minute dark comedy, which includes a star-crossed romance, a tale of two sisters’ fractured relationship and more. The super-smart and friendly Westfeldt recently chatted with Broadway.com about spending the dog days of summer acting off-Broadway and patiently answered questions about her real-life romance with Don Draper…er, Hamm.
You’ve just come off the set of 24. Why did you decide to do a play at Primary Stages rather than sit on a beach somewhere?
I’ve really missed theater. I miss how much it challenges you, and I miss doing roles that show some range. I tend to get parts that are either similar or don’t have a tremendous range within them. This part feels like a bear, something incredibly challenging and new, and I just want to try to rise to it. I’m totally terrified! [Laughs.]
What do you do enjoy about stage acting?
It’s so raw and real—and harder than anything else I can think of for an actor. Camera work has its own challenges, but usually you only have to focus on one or two or three scenes in a long day, and you have plenty of other people to help you look good and choose your best take, and editors to make the performance right based on the director’s thoughts. Here, it’s just you for, in our case, 90 minutes, and you have to tell the whole story and try to hit all the highs and all the lows every day.
What drew you to A Lifetime Burning?
First of all, I’m a huge fan of Cusi’s writing. It is so complicated and so smart and so multilayered. She’s painted an intricate portrait of a sick, troubled soul who wants to rewrite her life and her history. It’s a dark comedy—sometimes the emphasis is quite firmly on the dark—but I do think ultimately it’s uplifting. It’s really a story about two sisters and how they stick together through difficult and dysfunctional times. My goal is to embody the character with truth and with humor, to show her humanity and her heart.
Have you ever played a character like this?
No, I haven’t, and I’ve spent every moment that I’m not in rehearsals reading up on manic depression and on the people who have written these fictional memoirs. Just the research assignment has been a large one. It’s freeing to play a character that exhibits every emotion under the sun and every color in the spectrum. It’s freeing, and it’s scary.
Have you seen Next to Normal?
I’m desperate to see it. I’ve been overwhelmed with our rehearsal process, but I’m hoping there’s a performance that doesn’t conflict with our schedule because I hear [Alice Ripley] is brilliant.
Your last New York appearance, in the musical Wonderful Town, was pretty lengthy, right?
A little more than a year.
That was a big commitment.
It sure was! [Laughs.] I don’t think I knew what I was getting into with the eight shows a week singing and dancing for that long, just what it does to your body and your voice. You kind of have to live the life of a monk because you have to rest and save your voice. I was at the voice doctor a lot, and the physical therapist because of what dancing in high heels does to your feet. That part of it feels like [being an] Olympic athlete. But it was also a lifelong dream come true, to be with those wonderful actors in that show, written by Bernstein and Comden and Green, and Kathleen Marshall directing. Everyone involved was exactly the type of people I had always aspired to work with.
Did the Tony nomination make any difference in Hollywood?
When I got back to L.A., they said, “We haven’t seen you in a while. What have you been doing?” And I said, “I was in this very special Broadway show.” And they’re like, “Oh great, great. So what else have you been doing?” I was like, “Um, well that took up a lot of my year!” [Laughs.] Some people in L.A. understand the great heights and great difficulty of Broadway, but some people don’t get it.
What were your early days as an actress like—the five years or so after you graduated from Yale before you made Kissing Jessica Stein?
I did a lot of regional theater. I worked at the Denver Center and the Pittsburgh Public and the Repertory Theater of St. Louis. Here in town, I worked at LaMama and E.S.T. and I did The Fantasticks. Those early years are just going from play to play around the country. Then I went to L.A. and kind of got stuck out there.
Is that when you got your first series [Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place]?
Yes, I got that pilot the first week or two I was there. I actually had to drop out of a play I was going to do at George Street Playhouse. In between the pilot and the series, I had two months off, and that’s when I did the play that became Kissing Jessica Stein.
Is it true that your partner, Jon Hamm, appeared in Lipschtick, the play that inspired Kissing Jessica Stein?
He did. We had met before in Los Angeles; that’s why he came to do the play, and he had a cameo in the film. I had offered him the lead role that Scott Cohen ended up doing, but he was busy on [the TV show] Providence at the time. Maybe if that had worked out, it wouldn’t have taken people so long to discover his great talent.
You’ve had two screenplays produced. Was there ever a point when you felt you needed to decide whether to concentrate on writing and not acting?
I never intended to be a writer. It only came out of the frustration over how few roles there are for women that are really interesting or juicy. Generally speaking, five or six or seven ladies get to do those parts, and the rest of us are relegated to supporting the wonderful male roles—playing girlfriends and wives and that kind of thing. So writing just felt like a way to be proactive about my own work. Jon and I have just launched a production company, and we’ve got a few films in development, one of which I’ve written and another of which is a play of Cusi’s that I’m going to adapt. We’re continuing to be proactive about our careers, taking some of the reins and hoping to shape our future a bit.
You’ve done a lot of nice TV roles lately. What will you play on the upcoming season of 24?
I play a journalist. She’s described as “a young Diane Sawyer type,” and she has ties to the president of the Islamic Republic who is in disarmament negotiations with our president, played by Cherry Jones. That’s probably all I’m allowed to say! It was really interesting to get to work on 24. First of all, it’s one of the nicest sets. The entire crew has been together for eight seasons, and they welcomed me with open arms. And I’ve never worked in front of a green screen, which is another difficult task—to be in a field in Valencia in front of green screen pretending I’m on a corner in New York in front of the U.N. Only in the movies, as they say.
Did you get a lot of attention for your arc in Grey’s Anatomy? Your character’s death caused Patrick Dempsey’s nervous breakdown!
I’m responsible for McDreamy going off the rails, right? [Laughs.] Yeah, that show is so tremendously popular, with such a great fan base. I was amazed at the visibility of that role. I had no idea what I was getting into, but it was very gratifying.
Would you like to have a lead on a series again?
If it was the right role, I would love to. Jon’s situation [on Mad Men] is the one all actors dream of. A cable series is wonderful because it only takes up about four months of the year. The people on Grey’s Anatomy work 10 months of the year, and that’s incredibly challenging to keep doing year in and year out.
So much in this business is about all the stars aligning: the right role, the right vehicle, the right marketing campaign, the right writing, the right network, the right people behind you. They took a chance on him [in Mad Men], and honestly that’s because the creator, Matt Weiner, fought for him. The network was nervous about putting a show on the shoulders of a relative unknown, but Matt Weiner said, “It’s my show, and this is the guy I’m doing it with.”
Jon’s career is fascinating, because even though he’s incredibly talented, it took him 10 years to get his break on Mad Men.
He and I have always just believed deeply in each other as people, and as talents. It’s pretty amazing to see him finally getting his due, because I thought he was a star for 12 years.
There are lovely pictures of you two on opening night of Wonderful Town. He was supportive, even when you were working and he wasn’t.
Suddenly the two of you are popping up in celebrity magazines. Do you enjoy the whole red-carpet scene?
I’m a little shy when it comes to that stuff, but I’m trying to get better [laughs]. I enjoy Jon’s tremendous success and just being the proud girlfriend, but the red carpet stuff is stressful because you always feel, “Do I look okay?” There are people who dissect what you’re wearing, so that part of it is a little scary and new to me.
How do you stay grounded in the face of Jon’s newfound fame?
We have the same friends we’ve always had, and we really appreciate our down time, and time with our dog, and just watching TV and ordering in. We try to be as normal as possible, because that’s the bulk of our life together and it always will be.
I hate to ask the “marriage and kids” question, but you’ve written a movie about getting married multiple times [Ira & Abby] and played a pregnant woman in your most recent series [Notes from the Underbelly].
We always have felt married, so when and if we decide to make it legally official, I don’t think it would be a tremendous change. We might decide to do that. I don’t know. We’re already common-law in California [laughs]. On the child front, it’s certainly something we think about and talk about. It’s harder to imagine how to make that work without it derailing my career. That’s something that is very different for a woman than it is for a man. You take yourself out of the mix for so long, and I’m not yet in a position in my career that Jon is. If I were in that position, we’d probably already be on that track. But we’ll see what happens.
A recent New York magazine piece quotes you as referring to yourself as “the poor man’s Jennifer Aniston.” Did you really say that?
No, actually I didn’t. That was a quote from somebody else—a label a few people have put on me. People have their ways of categorizing you, but you just hope to keep doing work that changes the label and changes how people see you. That’s what I’m trying to do with this play.
See Jennifer Westfeldt in Primary Stages’ production of A Lifetime Burning at 59E59Theatres.