Oct 20, 2008 Filed Under: Interview,The Starter Wife,Will & Grace Comments (1)
Debra Messing has never been through a divorce, unlike her character Molly in the new TV series “The Starter Wife.”
But the Emmy-winning actress says she was able to identify with the pain of such a breakup by reflecting on the demise of her hit TV comedy series “Will & Grace” in which she co-starred for its full eight seasons.
“It snuck up on me,” Messing said of the parallel.
“When I read the script, I felt a deep connection to it and I didn’t really understand where it came from,” said Messing, whose new show stems from a miniseries and debuts Wednesday in Canada on Showcase.
“But then we were in Australia and we were about halfway through shooting the miniseries and then it just hit me just how much the journey that Molly the character was going through (was like) my personal journey,” she said in a phone interview from New York City where her husband, Daniel Zelman, is a writer and creator of the acclaimed TV drama “Damages.”
“The Starter Wife” sees Molly trying to come to terms with her more humble lifestyle after she’s dumped by her husband, a rich Hollywood film mogul, for a younger woman.
The script picks up where the six-part miniseries – which was nominated for 10 Emmy Awards – ended last year, and finds Molly swearing off men and getting serious about a writing career.
Messing says she was struck by how much her own life post-”Will & Grace” matched Molly’s life post-marriage.
“Molly’s whole identity was being the wife of this power broker, and my identity for almost a decade was Grace and I didn’t know what my new identity was going to be,” said Messing, who won the 2003 Emmy for playing Grace Adler alongside Canadian Eric McCormack, who played her gay roommate, Will.
“Molly … had always taken care of her husband and put her husband and her family first and hadn’t really had any practice at asking herself ‘What do I want, what do I need right now?’ And after this sort of catastrophic shakeup, she came through the other side and saw how exciting and what an opportunity it was to be able to ask those questions and to start over,” said Messing, who is also executive producer of the show.
“In a similar way … after I’d gone through the mourning process of saying goodbye to ‘Will & Grace,’ I was able to sit back and say, ‘Wow, I actually have the ability now to ask myself what do I want to do now, because my life isn’t scheduled anymore,’ and it became an adventure. So it was kind of an epiphany that just sort of happened, and then everything made sense.”
“The Starter Wife” is based on the 2005 bestselling novel by American author Gigi Levangie Grazer.
The title is akin to the term “starter house,” said Messing.
“Your first little house that you buy that is probably small and run-down and you have to put a lot of time and energy into fixing it up,” she said, noting the dramedy series also features a “starter husband.”
“And then you fix it up and it’s gorgeous and it’s beautiful but it’s just not good enough anymore and you have to sell it and you have to upgrade to a bigger, better, fancier house.”
“The Starter Wife” – which debuted Oct. 10 on USA Network – allows Messing to use her sharp comedic skills again, most notably in the elaborate fantasy scenes where Molly imagines herself as various women of power.
Also hilarious is the show’s satire of Hollywood culture and its value system.
In the first episode, Molly’s young daughter is given a BlackBerry by her father and uses it to talk non-stop like a big shot to her elementary school friends.
Messing took a long sigh when asked if she’s concerned about her four-year-old son, Roman, getting caught up in such extravagance.
“It’s so important to me that I give my son the kind of childhood that my parents gave to me, which was clear boundaries, clear rules, compassion and awareness of all the different difficulties that exist in our world and gratitude for what we have,” she said.
“I didn’t grow up in privilege but I didn’t know that and I was more than comfortable – I wanted for nothing – and I just want my son to feel safe emotionally and I want to keep his perspective of the world unskewed, and so we make all of our decisions as parents based on those goals.”
