(photo from Lifetime)
Swoozie Kurtz is going to appear to on 4 episodes of Lifetime’s
Rita Rocks starting tonight at 10p and I had the honor to interview her about it! Swoozie Kurtz leaves her mark in everything she does, whether it was playing Laurie Morgan on Love, Sidney or Alex on Sisters or Mrs. Jared in The Rule of Attraction or Madeline on Huff or Lily Charles on Pushing Daisies and most recently on Heroes as Millie, and now she will do the same playing Marilyn on Rita Rocks.
On tonight’s episode we meet her on the show and Rita is not looking forward to having her mom come for a visit. Her mom never approved of anything she did including the man that she married, but when she comes for a visit she is a completely new person Rita doesn’t know how to react to her. But by the end of the episode there is a really touching scene between Nicole Sullivan and Swoosie Kurtz, the first of many great scenes between the two during Swoosie’s four episodes.
So had Swoosie seen the show before she was offered the role? She told me she had not seen it before she got the role, but they sent her some DVDs to check out the show. She said that after watching them, “I gotta tell you, I sat down and I watched these and I kept going, ‘Oh, this is really good.’ It was sort of unexpectedly, somehow to me, very, very genuinely funny in a real kind of way. Whenever anything has a basis in reality, it tickles me more. Because when it is not credible, I just can’t laugh at something when it is not real and I just really related to it. It was very moving and it had a sweetness to it that is very refreshing. And I said, ‘Wow, this is really good. I think I have to do this!’†And she did do it, as I am sure you figured out. She was originally brought on for 3 episodes, but they kept her for a fourth one. It sounds like not only were the creators of the show (James Berg and Stan Zimmerman) a fan of her work for what she did with them on Rita Rocks, but here is a little tidbit, she told me they wrote a speck script for Love, Sidney back in the early ’80s and it took them up until now to work with her. As they were fans of her before Rita Rocks, she told me she was a fan Nicole Sullivan’s from her Mad TV days. See everything in Hollywood comes around.
And talking about coming around, what is it like for her to do another sitcom? She told me that she loves working on a sitcom again because it is the closest you can get to a theater. In the way, you rehearse it over and over again, working with the words on paper, making them better and better and then at the end of the week you dress up and perform in front of an audience. She told me she gets such an adrenaline rush from the audience and she says she learns so much from them and they teach her so much about the material and how it works for them.
So what is coming up for her on Rita Rocks? In the upcoming episodes she will be left alone with Rita’s husband, who she doesn’t get along with, to watch the house while Rita is away and something happens to Rita’s precious guitar. On another episode, Tisha Martin Campbell wants to throw Rita a baby shower, but Swoosie is hurt because she thinks she should throw the party. So the two decide to throw one together and let’s just say they both have very different tastes so it should be a funny episode. On her last episode for this season, she winds up meeting up with an old high school flame after her granddaughter teaches how to use Facebook. Rita is very upset about this because Swoosie’s character is still married to her dad, but this guy made her realize something is missing between them. So Swoosie and Rita have a heart-to-heart to conversation about her mother’s relationship with her father and it sounds likes that conversation will be really sweet one between the two of them. It sounds like there are going to be a lot of tender moments between them and I can’t wait to watch them all starting tonight at 10p!
Swoosie has played the mom before to actors like like Ben Stiller, Uma Thurman and Brooke Shields, but she loved what the writers wrote for her on Rita Rocks. She says they gave lots of juicy things to work with it. In fact I joked with her that her last few roles she always seems to play the alcoholic mom, but the thing that is so amazing about her is that she plays them all differently.
We also talked about Heroes, and believe it or not killing Nathan and/Sylar was her first assassin. She got that role when Bryan Fuller asked her to be on the show. You might remember Bryan and her worked on a show together for a few years called Pushing Daises and she told me that he was about to, if hadn’t already, hand in a comic book based on the show. When it comes to a Pushing Daisies movie that she tells me is still up in the air.
Swoosie will also be on ABC’s Hank for the Thanksgiving episode playing Kelsey Grammer’s mother-in-law. She said this character is different than what she is used to playing because she is really blue collar. Like at one point she unbuckles her pants at the table and that is different than the upscale characters she has played on Huff and Heroes and so on.
You know what role I would love to see her in? I would love to see her play Jane Lynch’s mom on Glee and have Ed Begley Jr play her husband. Don’t you think them as her parents would explain a lot? So hopefully the writers of Glee will see this!
So no matter what television show or movie you became a fan of Swoosie Kurtz’s, her appearance on Rita Rocks won’t disappoint. So make sure to watch her tonight and every Monday for the next few weeks on Lifetime at 10p! She sincerely makes everything she does better, and she does the same with Rita Rocks. A truly one of kind actress that we have thankfully been blessed with to watch throughout the years!!!
