TV

Take closer look at Kyra Sedgwick

Mastering character's tics, subtle nuances requires more skill from actress than hitting her marks

By Virginia Heffernan
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Sunday, July 16, 2006

If you want to find out what a woman is made of, send an enormous arrangement of flowers to her office. She'll instantly have to field an onslaught of mental states, including surprise, pride, humility, vulnerability and aggravation. It's hard to be professional among too many flowers.

Siccing flowers on someone is also a good way to find out if she can act. "The Closer," the crime drama that returned to TNT for its second season last month, confronted its flagrantly uncool lead, Brenda Leigh Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick), with a blizzard of roses, daisies and lilies. The suitcase-size delivery interrupted the confident banter of Johnson, the deputy police chief, and her homicide division at their Los Angeles headquarters, compelling her to forfeit her authority, affect graciousness, assume the floral burden and trundle back to her private office with the hedge. There she checked the card — yup, her boyfriend — and finally stared dolefully at the flowers, head in hands.

Flowers. We get it. She's good with interrogations, bad with compliments. Good with corpses, bad with love. But Sedgwick, who was nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal, has brought nuance, cunning and idiosyncrasy to Johnson's divided competencies. She often uses her character's bewildered interaction with the material world — the flowers, and notably Johnson's cavernous black hole of a pocketbook — to shade the role.

What makes a great television actress? Stage acting and film acting are often contrasted: As they say of China and Japan, one is very big and the other very small. But television acting is an altogether different enterprise. Accomplished without much rehearsal, homework or even direction, television acting, especially in soap operas and sitcoms, can become nothing but the hitting of marks. To be sure, at any given time the floor of the police department set of "The Closer" is pocked with colored gaffer tape, the small T's that show an actor where to put his toes and which way to angle his body.

But acting on a drama such as "The Closer" is more than gaffer tape. Dramatic leads such as Sedgwick — or Kiefer Sutherland on "24" or Edie Falco on "The Sopranos" — work extremely long days, often late into the night. While shooting, they are chronically exhausted, and much of their time between takes is spent conserving energy. A television set is therefore rigidly hierarchical, with the overworked leads given a wide berth by the crew and the lesser cast. After all, they must more than anyone manage the stop-and-start of television shoots without losing the thread of the plot and their performance. They have to keep focused even as the crew is mercilessly manipulating them with blocking and then racing them through shoots so everyone can accomplish all that needs to be done.

The job of television leads is still more complex because they rarely have time to commit their lines to memory; instead, they are typically fed dialogue between scenes. Moreover, they don't have many takes to get a line reading right, and minimal on-set work is done to ensure continuity — that sense of visual flow and verisimilitude that moviemakers take pride in.

To supply the illusion of continuity where none is assured, then, an actor has to be able to bring herself back to the same note — same voice, same gait, same tics — every time she is in character. In a successful drama, she will be required to find this note on cue day after day, year after year, for possibly hundreds of hours of airtime. If the note is actually a tricky chord, with lots of harmony, even some dissonance, it can become exceedingly hard to hit.

Because of this difficulty, great television actors wisely keep their characters comfortable and within easy reach, often playing versions of themselves (Lauren Graham in "Gilmore Girls"), commedia dell'arte archetypes (Denis Leary on "Rescue Me") or a touch of both (Kevin James in "The King of Queens"). Comfort and ease suit the mostly homebound medium well: People in their living rooms like their small-screen friends relaxing, familiar and mostly predictable. For this reason, television acting is often dismissed by movie snobs as either too uninflected or too broad.

Sedgwick, who has taken the risk of not being comfortable on "The Closer," errs on the broad side, and that's a good choice, as she enlivens what could have been a by-the-numbers procedural. But Johnson also represents a reach for Sedgwick: She is stammery, addicted to sugar, socially annoying and — above all — reflexively but insincerely polite and kind. She also has a big Southern accent that is not native to the actress. And when her serpentine interrogations compel confessions from sympathetic and lawyerless people (including, this season, a man whose young son had cancer) she seems borderline cruel.

None of Johnson's dark, bothersome side comes through in the print advertisements for "The Closer," of course, because Sedgwick in photographs can easily be made to look like a regular InStyle television belle. She is attractive enough for it, as well as slim and streaky-blond. But when she is in character, she works against the loveliness of her face, confidently playing up its homely dimensions to create a curious and perceptive character whose lifework is squinting, staring and straining to see. A good-looking detective might, at 40, look plausibly like Johnson, whose face appears permanently creased with concern and perplexity and whose nervous eyes are evidently more used to peering than being gazed into.

Because Sedgwick, whose background is in movies, is not a small-screen pro like James, she has had to use a little commedia with Johnson, and she is un-self-conscious enough to really go for it. With the pocketbook wrestling and the accent, there is inevitably scenery-chewing, but in general the performance is defined by gusto and lack of vanity.

Sedgwick has cited Helen Mirren's showpiece character, Jane Tennison (on "Prime Suspect"), as her inspiration for Johnson. Like Mirren, Sedgwick has somehow managed to incorporate the practical challenges of television acting into her performance. In fact, Johnson's balance of nervousness, virtuosity, arrogance, self-effacement, prettiness and neuroticism elegantly reflect the character of television itself. Now if she can get viewers comfortable with her discomfort, Sedgwick will not only win an Emmy, she'll also carry "The Closer" all the way to syndication, that state of television grace.