OK! caught up with the ravishing redhead at Thursday night’s Chanel Dinner for the Tribeca Film Festival, where she explained that playing with her son Roman helps to keep her grounded — quite literally.

“When I’m on the floor with my son — Look at my knees, do you see? Majorly skinned knees,” she pointed out to OK!. “That’s from my son’s birthday party on Saturday at the gym and I was crawling on the floor. Skinned knees and chasing after a little boy keeps everything in perspective.”

Debra also told OK! that what she enjoys doing most with Roman, 4, is sharing a good book.

“We like to read together,” she explained. “We have an embarrassingly big library. I’m a book fanatic so he gets to go and pick out whatever he wants and his choice changes all the time.”

Appearing on the red carpet in a tiara, the Will & Grace star was asked if she was styling herself on the British Royal Family.

“You know I’ve never worn a tiara before and now I get it – you Brits really have something! And I feel like everyone should bow to me,” she said.

“And I feel like perhaps I should sleep in this and wear it to the market. There’s something about it that makes you walk a little taller.”

Debra was also donning a glamorous nude-coloured jewelled gown and she revealed she had several outfit changes planned during the event, the 11th Annual Costume Designers Guild Awards.

The actress said the importance of costumes in her job was “really kind of magical.”

“I don’t know who I am until I have the clothes on. It’s – literally – it changes the way you walk, the way you breathe, the way you stand, they way you speak”.

She said one of the most memorable outfits she wore as Grace was a “squirting water bra.”

“I mean until I actually had that on and was working with it, it was just an idea, and then they made it happen and then it was like, oh my gosh, this is gonna be remembered forever”.

Debra on; Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno & The View

LINKS TO THE REST OF THE VIDEOS:
Nothing Like The Holidays – Interview #1
Nothing Like The Holidays – Interview #2
Nothing Like The Holidays – Interview #3
Nothing Like The Holidays – Interview #4
Nothing Like The Holidays – Interview #5
Nothing Like The Holidays – Interview #6
Nothing Like The Holidays – Interview #7
Nothing Like The Holidays – Interview #8
Nothing Like The Holidays – Interview #9
Nothing Like The Holidays – Premiere #1
Nothing Like The Holidays – Premiere #2

In the comedy, which debuts in U.S. theaters on Friday, a Puerto Rican family comes together at Christmas for the first time in three years, and Messing plays a very non-Latina career-driven executive wife of the family’s eldest brother, played by John Leguizamo.

“I’d never been an outsider in a film,” Messing said. “I very much felt like the white Jewish girl and it was the first time I had ever been the minority on the set.”

Messing tried to “access my inner Latina” by recalling her elementary school Spanish during the shoot, she said.

The 40-year-old Messing said the film marks a step forward in Hollywood because it is essentially a mainstream holiday film but one that focuses on a minority, Latino family.

“Nothing Like the Holidays” follows the Rodriguez family during a holiday gathering in Chicago that is prompted by the youngest brother’s return from combat overseas.

An ensemble piece, the movie details the trials of each family member’s career or personal relationships. Messing’s character, Sarah, for instance, struggles with whether to take a new, high-powered job while facing pressure from her husband and mother-in-law to start a family.

“That’s not specific to the Puerto Rican culture,” Messing said of the themes the movie pursues. “I could see an Italian family on screen, I could see a Jewish family on screen. You could just fill in the blank, because family is family.”

At the same time, she added, “you can learn and celebrate the Puerto Rican culture, which has never really been done.”

CULTURE WATCHER

Messing, who shot to stardom on eight seasons of the NBC sitcom “Will & Grace,” said she hoped “Nothing Like the Holidays” would help break down cultural barriers in Hollywood in much the same way “Will & Grace” brought gay characters to mainstream TV audiences in a hit prime-time

show.

“It would be wonderful if this film in some way has a similar effect, representing a community who is normally not represented, not written about, and often represented in stereotypes,” Messing said.

She said the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president made her hopeful that Hollywood will embrace characters of different cultural backgrounds.

“There is an excitement about the possibility of tolerance, especially now we are going to have our first African American president,” she said. “It seems like a reflection of that, this film. And I hope it does become a trend.”

Messing has appeared in several movies since “Will & Grace” wound down in 2006, including the high-society comedy “The Women” earlier this year.

Despite wanting to focus on films and plays following that show’s end, however, Messing is back on television in USA Network’s series “The Starter Wife,” in which she plays the ex-wife of a Hollywood mogul.

“It was not in my master plan,” Messing said of her latest TV stint, adding that the program’s 5-month shooting schedule still gives her the flexibility she craved when “Will & Grace” ended.

“That was much more palatable being A, a mother, and B, someone who just wanted to be able to say ‘I don’t know what I’m going to be doing,’ and to give myself some air so I could figure out what I was hungering for,” Messing said.

With her time off last year, Messing shot “Nothing Like the Holidays” in five weeks. The short schedule was critical, given she has a four-year-old son at home and her husband, Daniel Zelman, also has a busy schedule as writer and producer of the cable TV show “Damages.”

“It’s impossibly hard,” Messing said of managing the demands of both motherhood and work. “Compromises are made every month, and it just feels like ‘Okay, this is the life of an adult woman in America.’”

(Reporting by Nichola Groom; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

And now she’s back on the big screen in Nothing Like the Holidays, a dramedy about a dysfunctional Puerto Rican family struggling to find a little joy at a Christmas reunion. Messing plays the daughter-in-law who’s trying to keep her marriage together without sacrificing her career.

Q: Did you feel a little left out being the only Anglo in the family?

A: Actually, it was fascinating. By the end of the film the culture became sort of irrelevant. It was all about family. I saw my Jewish family and I saw my Italian friends’ family in the movie. I think there’s something beautiful about the idea that it’s a holiday film about an American family who happens to be Puerto Rican.

Q: Judging from all the food in scene after scene, eating is a Puerto Rican holiday tradition.

A: And everything was delicious. I gained 10 pounds in five weeks eating during those scenes. I’m not kidding. I think some of the guys gained a lot more. We would check in with each other every week like, ‘How much did you gain?’

Q: Did you have a favorite Puerto Rican holiday custom?

A: I’d never heard of the paranda before, and actually being able to experience it was even more extraordinary. You go caroling from house to house and at each stop another family joins you until you have a sea of people walking down the street singing. It was great fun to film, except it was horrendously cold.

Q: How cold was it?

A: It was Antarctic cold. Seriously, like 25 below zero. Who knew that it could get that cold in America anywhere? And none of us were dressed for it. It was just insanity.

Q: How did you survive?

DM: I Googled ‘Antarctica’ and found out what people who are researchers wear who have to live there for months on end. Then I went to this site online and bought a coat that promises to keep you warm to 100 degrees below zero. I thought, ‘I only need 25 below so 100 will cover it.’ But it didn’t arrive until four days before we wrapped. But those were the warmest four days of my entire life. I just went, ‘Why didn’t I think of this earlier?’

Q: What would you like Santa to bring you for Christmas?

A: A Kindle. It’s a new technological gadget that weighs about two pounds and is the size of a small paperback book. It can hold like a hundred novels and it’s ecologically responsible because you’re saving trees and paper. And you can also get newspapers and magazines downloaded.

Q: When you were growing up, did you look forward to the holidays?

A: I grew up in New England, we almost always had a white Hanukkah and a white Christmas.  And there was always hot cocoa and the fire going and sledding outside. It was heaven. Now, I travel all the time, but if I can get the whole family together with me at the holidays, then that’s the best gift anyone could give me.

Q: Are you getting any feedback from the fans of Starter Wife?

A: Women literally stop me on the street and they’re like, ‘I am a starter wife.’ I was campaigning in Pennsylvania for Obama, and we went to this lower income African American senior citizens’ home. This older woman came up to me and she was like, ‘Honey, I’m a starter wife. That’s me.’ And I was like, ‘But you’re a survivor, right?’ She said, ‘Damn straight.’ So I think a pretty broad group are connecting with the series.

Q: Since you campaigned for Obama, will you be at his inauguration?

A: At the end of election night we were at a rally with Vice President Elect Biden, and there was someone there who was like, ‘Oh, now that we’ve won, you have to come to the inaugural party.’ And he gave me his card. For some reason, I haven’t called because I was like, ‘Oh, I’m sure everyone is calling him.’ But now maybe I will.

Source.

In the seminal, groundbreaking sitcom Messing called home for eight years, she played single, straight interior designer Grace Adler, best friend to Will Truman, a gay lawyer looking for love and a comfortable life in the big city.

Messing no longer plays the best friend. In The Starter Wife, she’s the centre of attention as Molly Kagan, a struggling writer of children’s books who finds herself divorced and forced to scrape by without the comfy settlement she’d always expected, and believed was her right.

“This is so different from my last experience,” Messing said. “In the miniseries, Molly’s life begins again, really. The mini-series was kind of like summer, and now school begins. It’s about how she feels about her new love life, about entering the Hollywood world and trying to make a living, and interacting with (her) ex-husband much more than she expected.”

Molly’s ties to her ex-husband are hard to break, because they share a seven-year-old daughter and because he’s a power broker, kingmaker and decision maker in the very world she’s trying to break into as a fledgling scriptwriter, now that she’s on her own.

Being dumped unceremoniously and without warning is a situation many once-married women have found themselves in, Messing said.

“What was most surprising to me, after the miniseries, was how many women would come up to me, and not just in Los Angeles,”Messing said. “I would be in airports in the middle of the country, and women would come up and say, ‘I’m a starter wife.’ It was validating. It was validating to see it really is as universal as we thought it might be, even though our story is specific to Hollywood.

“I think a lot of these women feel like, ‘Wow, I’ve never been represented before. There’s never been a TV show or movie about this phenomenon.’ I think it makes them feel like they’re not alone, and yet, we can have a lot of fun with it.”

There will be pitfalls and missteps along the way, but life will work out for Molly in the end, Messing said.

Messing doesn’t want to think about The Starter Wife’s life beyond the current season, though.

“Oh, gosh, I can’t speak to that now,” she said. “Every time I’ve tried to guess what I would be doing, or even feel like doing, six months from now, I’ve always been wrong. So my credo is to not even try to predict what will happen and just make the best show we can and have as much fun as we can, and hope that people respond as well as they did to the miniseries. Who knows? It might turn into geriatric Hollywood. We all might be going into the movie version as seniors. You never say never.”

Source.

Q: When you were filming the miniseries did you have any thought or maybe even any inclination that this might eventually go to series?

Debra Messing: Absolutely none. No, absolutely none.

It was adapted from a novel and it was finite and we finished the novel. I think that what happened was that when the miniseries got ten Emmy nominations it just sort of shocked everybody, including myself. USA called and said I think we’ve touched a nerve. I think that there’s something here that is modern and relevant and has not been explored in TV or film before. At least that’s what all the people who stop me on the street, the people who say, “That’s me. I’m a starter wife,” or “I’m a starter husband,” that’s what I’ve been hearing the most is like that’s me and you’ve never seen anything on TV that really shows my life and my struggles.

I think that all bets were off after those ten Emmy’s and we sat down and said, “Okay, can this be a long running series?” Once we realized that all the things that worked from the miniseries would be maintained, and that we just wanted to build on that and expand the world of The Starter Wife and add new characters and have fun with the storylines, we realized that it could have a long life as a series. I’m so grateful to USA that they did that.

Q: “The Starter Wife” uses a lot of fantasy scenes from movies. Do you have a favorite?

Debra Messing: It’s so hard to pick a favorite because they just kept getting better and better. Right off the top of my head, I’d have to say the Sharon Stone in “Basic Instinct,” which is in the last episode of the series, and playing Carol Channing singing, instead of “Hello, Molly” singing “Hello, Dolly.” Singing and dancing and doing a big song and dance number, that was a highlight for me.

Q: Which one have you not done yet that you would like to do?

Debra Messing: Oh, goodness, there’s a whole laundry list of ones I’d like to do. One of them is “Gone with the Wind,” just because where we shoot in Los Angeles is where “Gone with the Wind” was shot and I think sort of an homage to our location would be fun. I also would love to do a silent movie with subtitles. I think that would be really fun.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about Molly’s budding writing career?

Debra Messing: Well, what I will say is that her writings in her journal have been sort of a social commentary, a comic social commentary of her own and that gets stolen and from that experience attention is brought to Molly and some unusual professional opportunities arise. It will certainly test Molly in terms of what’s important to her and ethics and sort of being thrown into the middle of the whole Hollywood game.She’s going to have to be dealing with her ex-husband in the professional world for the first time. So there are some fun, new dynamics that are explored.

(Pausing) Well, let’s just put it this way, her life is not going to become a fairly tale within ten episodes. Even if she gets a job it’s not going to be the answer to everything or she’s not going to be catapulted to stardom.

Q: Which makes sense. I’m guessing that you wouldn’t want a character that would have it all figured out in one season.

Debra Messing: No, no, that’s what I respond to about Molly is that she doesn’t have it figured out and that she is written in a way that she’s a fighter and she’s a survivor, but she’s constantly butting up against obstacles, and to me that’s real life. I love the juxtaposition of the fantasy world of Hollywood and the Utopia that is presumed in that world and the very real and accessible daily struggles in every aspect of the protagonist’s life, of Molly.

Q: How did it come about that you’re also now executive producing the show?

Debra Messing: Well, during the miniseries I was lucky enough to be invited in to be a collaborator, a creative collaborator. So I had a lot of say in terms of the rewrites and the look of the show and the casting, so it was a natural progression because it’s the same writers that are running the show, and the three of us we just got on like gangbusters and respect each other and love each other very much.

In addition to it being a natural progression, though, honestly, I think it just made it easier for me to sign on for potentially another 6.5 years onto a series, knowing that the title executive producer does add some certain creative protections for me, in that, as executive producer my opinions and my voice will be at least considered if I feel like something is changing in the show as time is going on that is important to me or that I feel like is essential to the show or if they want to take it in a direction that I’m not comfortable with. And just knowing that I have that protection allows me just to dive in with 100% excitement and commitment and energy into the entire experience.

Finally, it’s turned out to be something that I actually am good at. When you’re an actor you’re just focusing on yourself all the time on the set, working 14 hour days and thinking about your character and as executive producer I have to look at the whole and not just at my stuff. It’s sort of right brain, left brain work and it’s exhausting, but I find it really, really just stimulating and gratifying.

“I was doing the movie, “A Walk in the Clouds,” and they wanted my hair auburn, but they didn’t want to send me to a fancy salon,” she says.

“I was in a Motel 6 up in Napa Valley and somebody was pouring bleach on my head for 13 hours. And it never was even, and it ended up I was a Titian red — it was awful,” she chuckles.

“Then I got this Clairol commercial with the understanding that I would have to get a normal color hair. But I had to keep my hair some color red in case I had to go back and reshoot ‘A Walk in the Clouds.’ Then all of a sudden everything I auditioned for, I got.” Four weeks earlier as a brunette, Messing couldn’t get arrested.

A casting director, who’d seen her many times, may have saved her career when she called Messing’s agent and reported that Messing was sabotaging herself in auditions.

“‘She is wearing so much makeup that it’s like kabuki, and she looks 10 years older than she really is,’ the casting director said.

“I was putting stage makeup on, that’s all I knew,” shrugs Messing, who starred for eight years on “Will and Grace.”

Messing was first drawn to acting as a shy child. “I felt safer being somebody else than myself.

“I was sort of not in the ‘in’ social circles as a little girl and didn’t feel very good in my skin. The one place I felt like I could lie was onstage.”

Acting also gave her an excuse to be flamboyant.

“I was in all the high school plays, high school can be brutal for everybody. That was my safe haven. I didn’t have to be accountable for being brave and being outrageous because it was in the script, it wasn’t me choosing to do it, I was forced to do it.

“I think that was the thing that drew me to it at first, and now 20 years later I think I’m really curious about what drives people, their behavior.”

Though she longed to attend the High School of Performing Arts, her parents — a sales executive dad and a real estate and travel agent mom — insisted she have a “normal” childhood and study drama in college.

She aced her studies at Brandeis University and earned her master’s degree at New York University. It was there that she met her future husband, Daniel Zelman, co-creator and executive producer of “Damages.” Once out of school she landed a job in Seattle, but Zelman was working in New York at the time. It was then she made an important discovery about herself.

“I realized I’m not a gypsy. I can’t live out of a suitcase, so my whole master plan had to be thrown away. There is a nesting impulse for me, and I just have to honor it and trust that at some point someone will acknowledge that I have something to contribute.”‘

She catered the re-election dinner for former New York Mayor David Dinkins. She was a hopeless coat-check girl who lost all the tags. “I had to literally let everyone come in and find their coats … I was a mess, and I was fired.”

Finally she landed a job as an understudy in “Three Dogs and a Bone,” for $233 a week before taxes. But at least, she was a working actress.

She and Zelman have been together for 17 years. About their lasting relationship, she nods, “I think we’re lucky we met really young when we were both students and hopeful about the future and excited by the romance of the struggle then. I think we just have a real respect for each other as individuals, and I think we’re lucky as we grew up together we grew closer instead of farther away.”

The mother of 4-year-old Roman, she says having her son changed her. “I think I’ve relaxed my need for control. I think that one of the beauties and joys of a child is the unexpected and being open and ready to be there to encourage anything that occurs to them. That flexibility had a really good effect on me as a whole, as a person.”