What's Up, Jessica Hecht? The Stage Vet's View of Liev & Scarlett, Plus Her Workout-Queen Past and TV Ban

It’s been a crazy couple of months for Jessica Hecht, whose well-reviewed turn as Blanche in the Broadway revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs ended abruptly (along with a planned revival of Broadway Bound) a week after opening. The talented Hecht wasn’t idle for long, jumping from comedy to tragedy to play Liev Schreiber’s wife Beatrice in Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, which opens January 24. By now, she’s used to juggling funny and serious roles, both onstage (The Last Night of Ballyhoo, Stop Kiss, Julius Caesar) and on TV (Friends, Breaking Bad). The mom of a 10-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son chatted with Broadway.com about her new show and blissfully ordinary home life.

So, you jumped directly from Brighton Beach Memoirs to A View from the Bridge....
It’s nuts! That never happens. They’re both classics, but it was such an abrupt switch in terms of the kinds of parts they are.

How are audiences responding?
They’ve been terrific. It’s such a difficult play, and we were rehearsing in this tiny space in which the atmosphere of the play seemed to infect the room with anxiety. I’m not Method-y—at the end of the day, I want to go home and make tofu and have a life with my family—but with this play, I would be wound up. Then we walked into the Cort Theatre, which is so beautiful, and as soon as we started acting on that stage, it was like we had been set free from the penitentiary [laughs]. Basically the sky opened.

What’s it like to be paired onstage with Liev Schreiber?
There are certain people that it’s thrilling to act with, and he’s one of them. He’s incredibly sharp, incredibly intelligent—nothing gets by him. I don’t usually work from as intellectual a place, but because I didn’t have that much time, it’s helped me tremendously to be thrown into a different, tight way of working.

Scarlett Johansson seems very self-possessed. Are you enjoying working with her?
Self-possessed is a great word, but she’s not in any way full of herself or aware of her accomplishments in the way you would expect from someone who has been so successful so young. She is the nicest, most down-to-earth person. My husband [TV director Adam Bernstein] joked, “From your description, she would probably be just as happy to babysit for us as she would be to make a movie.” She definitely feels the pressure of doing a Broadway show and repeating her performance, and she asks a ton of questions, but she’s super-grounded. She’s a very deep person.

Is she a good stage actress?
She’s really good. You know what? She’s totally present, and it’s easy to act with her and to find this relationship because she’s eminently lovable.

You’ve played your share of aggrieved wives, and yet you’re happily married in real life.
These long-suffering [women]; yeah, it is funny to me. Sadly, I’m at the point where a lot of my friends are going through divorces, and they’re all like, “God, you’re so lucky.” And I really am. I have a pretty traditional life, and I insist on keeping it that way. I love making dinner and cleaning the house. My husband is a very successful director and goes away a lot for work; when he comes back and I have a flash of frustration or anger, he says, “That character is really coming out!” [Laughs.]

Do people still talk to you about Friends? [Hecht played Susan, the lesbian partner of Ross’ ex-wife Carol.]
All the time! Just in the last year, I’ve felt that Friends was a great thing to be part of. Not that I didn’t appreciate it before, but it’s common with actors to look at something you did 15 years ago and feel, “Gosh, I was such a novice.” I haven’t done sitcoms in years, and we don’t have a regular TV—we watch videos—so I don’t see television that much. My kids have never seen Friends.

Wait—your husband directs TV shows [including 30 Rock, Breaking Bad, Scrubs, Weeds and Californication] and you don’t have a TV?
He hates for the kids to watch commercial stuff, and I completely concur—although my son just won the ability to have cable. He’s eight and a half, and my husband, who is a chess fanatic, made a bet that if my son beat him in a chess match, he could get cable. Carlos beat him, so now we’re getting the RCN [digital cable] package.

Is it true that you once worked at a gym and trained lots of famous people?
It’s funny you say that, because I recently saw Alan Eisenberg, one of the producers of the Neil Simon plays and head of [Actors] Equity for many years. He said, “I feel like we’ve known each other forever, but we’ve never really talked.” I said, “Actually, I used to work you out and give you a backrub when I was 21. I’ve seen you sweating. You probably blocked that out.” And it all came back to him. I worked out Isabella Rossellini, James Taylor, Jim Jarmusch, Eric Bogosian, Wendie Malick, Ellen Barkin. All these people have a vague memory of having known me somewhere, and I’m like, “Yeah, you knew me wearing Spandex pants!”