“Even though I am sleeping with the star, it’s still a gig that’s not easy to get,” quips Kevin Bacon of directing his second episode of “The Closer,” starring his Emmy-nominated wife Kyra Sedgwick airing tonight (8/13). “I was thrilled the first time they asked me to do it, but I was even more thrilled when they didn’t hate the first one so much.”
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| Kevin Bacon Happy To Direct, But Not Act In Kyra Sedgwick’s ‘Closer’ |
In the segment, Sedgwick’s character, Deputy Police Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson is traumatized after her encounter with a serial killer, while at the same time she has to deal with her reluctance to tell her visiting parents she’s become engaged to FBI agent Fritz Howard (Jon Tenney). Bacon says watching his wife in another man’s arms is a piece of cake. “It’s a lot harder to see her get shot at, which she does in this episode. That and her going through so much emotional trauma is much more difficult for me to watch. She’s someone who commits a 1,000 percent every moment she’s in front of that camera and cares so deeply about her work and making all these little moments … I kind of feel when you direct ‘The Closer’ you can come on the set and just say, ‘Action!’ and get out of her way.”
Meanwhile, Bacon — who’s currently shooting HBO’s “Taking Chance” drama and has the big-screen “Death Sentence” due out Aug. 30 — says there’s no way he’s going to pop up on his wife’s series. “I feel like that would be really bad stunt casting. It would sort of take people out of it. One of the great things about the show is that she’s created a character that’s so different, she’s completely foreign to who Kyra is. I think anything that steps in the way of that and makes people go ‘Oh, that’s Kyra Sedgwick’ would just be a mistake as much as I’d like to act on the show. Plus, I don’t think she’d let me, and she’s the producer, too.” So much for sleeping with the star!
TAKING IT ALL OFF: Former “The Nanny” regular Madeline Zima says doing her first love scene ever in an upcoming episode of Showtime’s “Californication” series opposite David Duchovny was “a little strange, but once I was actually there in the buff, it was all business. David’s very professional.” The 21-year-old actress plays Mia, a Lolita-like fan-borderline-stalker of Duchovny’s character, Hank Moody — a troubled novelist whose obsessions with sex and drugs interfere with his personal and professional lives — in the series debuting tonight (8/13). “I worked out like a madwoman for that scene,” she adds, “because you can’t really hide anything on camera, but it was something I was looking forward to in a way. I don’t think there’s any way to be false when you’re naked. You have to really be committed.”
Zima says her character “is definitely not a cliché teenager. She’s very smart and strong and ambitious. It’s a fun role to do because she’s so different from me because she’s sort of a wild card. She grew up without a mom, and her father is a successful businessman always away on trips so she grew up without any real guidance. She’s also wealthy, and like most teenagers with a lot of money and not much discipline, she does pretty much whatever she wants without much consequence. It’s both challenging and exciting to play because you never know what she’s going to do next.”
OFF THE LOT: “Cold Case” star Kathryn Morris admits she was a little disconcerted recently when driving to the downtown Los Angeles location of her CBS series. She pulled up to a group of assembled motor home dressing rooms, equipment and catering trucks — only to be told, “‘You can’t park here.’ It was the ‘Mad Men’ production company, not ours,” recalls Morris, referring to the new Showtime series. “There were three different shows working in the same area that day, so there was some confusion.”
ON THE ‘NET: “State of Mind” regular Devon Gummersall reports he’s been juggling shooting of his Lifetime series with “Quarterlife,” the new upcoming Internet series from Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz. But he won’t be on camera for the latter project. “I’m working as a writer,” says Gummersall, who directed and wrote the indie film “Robbing ‘Hef.” “Quarterlife” follows a group of “25-year-olds in that awkward stage between college and adult life when you’re just out of college and thrust into the real world and have to figure out who you are. It’ll start airing in the fall in 10-minute webisodes.” He adds, “It’s going to be a first-class project, shot pretty much in the typical sophisticated Zwick/Herskovitz way, with high production values the same as if it was for TV or a movie, but it’ll air on the Internet. It’s exciting to explore the possibilities of the Internet because a lot of it is still uncharted territory.”
The actor, who plays wet-behind-the-ears attorney Barry White on “State of Mind,” says the troupe is more than halfway through its order of eight episodes.
(With reports by Stephanie DuBois and Emily Feimster)