Elizabeth is leaving Weeds for a big-screen turn as another mother figure in “I Hop” a live-action/CG-animated comedy.

Repped by Gersh and Brillstein Entertainment Partners, is ending her five-year run on the Showtime series, for which she has earned three Emmy nominations for supporting actress in a comedy series as well as two Golden Globe noms.

I Hop is directed by Tim Hill, the April 1, 2011 release tells the tale of an out-of-work slacker (James Marsden) who accidentally injures the Easter Bunny (voiced by Russell Brand) and must take him in as he recovers. As Fred struggles with the world’s worst houseguest, both will learn what it takes to finally grow up.

Elizabeth will play Marsden’s exasperated mother in the Illumination Entertainment/Universal production. She also is developing a comedy series as a starring vehicle for herself.

 

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THE decision to leave film for TV was a “no-brainer” for Weeds star Elizabeth Perkins.

“The roles are better, there’s more depth to the writing and you don’t have to pump your face full of s— to get the part,” she says.

“And I do not want to go through life looking like the Joker.”

The 49-year-old star of movies such as Big and Must Love Dogs is one of the many older actresses migrating from film to TV in search of more satisfying roles.

She joins Glenn Close (Damages), Oscar winners Holly Hunter (Saving Grace) and Sally Field (Brothers and Sisters), Kyra Sedgwick (The Closer), Jane Lynch (Glee) and Jeanne Tripplehorn (Big Love) on the small screen this year.

Others such as Jessica Lange (Grey Gardens), Sigourney Weaver (Prayers for Bobby) and Joan Allen (Georgia O’Keefe) have appeared in made-for-TV movies and been rewarded with Golden Globe nominations for their efforts.

Aussies Rachel Griffiths (Brothers & Sisters) and Toni Collette (The United States of Tara) have also won acclaim for TV work.

Television used to be seen as a lesser medium to film, but Perkins says TV is now the only place actresses over 40 can find juicy parts without pressure to have plastic surgery, Botox and extreme dieting to look younger than their years.

“I would still love to do some film work, but the satisfying work is in TV these days,” she says.

In Weeds, the cult black comedy about a suburban mum turned marijuana dealer (played by Boys on the Side star Mary-Louise Parker), Perkins plays psychotic and neurotic social-climber Celia.

And she couldn’t be happier about finally embracing her dark side.

Perkins has received multiple nominations for Emmys and for Golden Globes for her work in Weeds.

“I had always wanted to do it (play a twisted character), but somehow I ended up the girlfriend or the supportive mum,” she says.

“I was bored out of my mind.

“The great thing about it (Weeds) for Mary-Louise and I is we get to play viable women who are still sexually desirable and who are still living their lives.

“I’m almost 50.

“I feel really really grateful for this. It’s the role of my career.”

Perkins says there is so much pressure on women in Hollywood that some actresses are going to extreme lengths to stay young and thin in order to get work.

“Walking down Rodeo Drive now is like a horror show,” she says.

“You see these 60-year-old women who do not want to look 60. It’s so screwed up.

“When archeologists dig up people (from today) they will say, ‘ahh this was the generation where people were obsessed with putting things (breast implants, collagen, Botox) in their bodies’.

“It will seem as weird to them as people getting ribs removed in the Victorian era seems to us now.”

Perkins says plastic surgery is now so prevalent in Hollywood that she often doesn’t recognise some of her peers until they open their mouths to speak.

“They look completely different,” she says.

“It’s freaky.”

Perkins says she admires Fargo actor Frances McDormand’s approach to Hollywood’s youth obsession.

“I remember her saying that she planned to be the only actress in Hollywood who was not going to get plastic surgery,” she says.

“That way, she would be the only one left that actually looked 60 and would end up getting all the parts.”

Even though she avoids the limelight and doesn’t aspire to be the Hollywood stereotype, Perkins says sometimes the realities of fame cannot be avoided.

Recently diagnosed with a rare form of diabetes, Perkins piled on almost 16kg.

She was shocked when her agent called to ask if the rumours that she was “really fat” were true.

“The tabloids were like ‘Elizabeth Perkins pregnant or just a fat pig?’,”she says.

“I try not to take any notice of the tabloids, but it’s hard not to take that personally.”

 

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Elizabeth Perkins talked about the lack of acting work for women over 40 in Hollywood.

The actress said television is the place for any actress who turns 40 as they don’t demand she inject Botox and other viscous fillers into her face or undergo extreme dieting.

‘The roles are better, there’s more depth to the writing and you don’t have to pump your face full of sh** to get the part. The great thing about it [Weeds] for me is I get to play a viable woman who is still sexually desirable and who is still living her life. I’m almost 50. And I do not want to go through life looking like the Joker,’ she added.

Perkins also compared Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles to a modern-day horror show.

‘Walking down Rodeo Drive now is like a horror show. You see these 60-year-old women who do not want to look 60. It’s so screwed up.

‘When archaeologists dig up people [from today] they will say, ‘ahh this was the generation where people were obsessed with putting things [breast implants, collagen, Botox] in their bodies.’ It will seem as weird to them as people getting ribs removed in the Victorian era seems to us now.’

 

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Q) What are the recent projects that you are working on?
A) Aside from doing the show, I’m a stay at home mom.

Q) What is new this season on “Weeds” with your character Celia Hodes?
A) Celia kind of gets up after being kicked to the ground for the last two seasons. Last year she had her teeth punched out and her face knocked in. She was kidnapped and sort of run through the mill. This season she gets sober and she gets back up on her feet. She tries to straighten out her life.

Q) What made you want to be a part of the show?
A) I was given the script and thought it was one of the best written pilots that I ever read. I found out that Mary Louise Parker was going to be playing the lead and they were interested in having Kevin Nealon be on the show. That was a huge draw for me because I am a huge fan of both of them. It was also just a chance to play this outrageous character

Q) What about your role continues to challenge you?
A) I think that, in terms of our show, it’s such an outrageous premise and the character arcs that everyone takes are kind of so phenomenal that we never know from one week to the next what our character is going to be doing. It’s almost like we’re putting on a one act play every week. As an actor, it’s really inspiring and it’s really challenging. It gives you the opportunity to be really outrageous and to do the unexpected. That’s always fun.

Q) Where do you draw from for your portrayal?
A) No, I’m completely one hundred percent one hundred-eighty degrees from her. A lot of people refer to Celia as sort of ignorantly evil and probably the world’s worst mother. I’ve sort of based her on a lot of people I’ve met or a lot of people I know. I would think the only thing that is even close to me, with Celia, is her sarcasm. That’s something that I love and am very grateful I get to bring to the role.

Q) How does the cast continue to maintain such great chemistry between each other?
A) Any actor whose been doing a show for any length of time it becomes second nature. They become like your family and you sort of have a shorthand with the way you speak to each other. You have a specific way of working that you know if you throw a ball out to some person they are going to catch it and throw it back to you. So, there is a real sense of security and safety in that. I think we’re all willing to take more risks than we would on the first season of the show or if we were a guest star on another show. You just become comfortable and that’s the real catalyst for great work.

Q) What has been your most memorable moment from filming season five?
A) I can’t give away too much, but I think my favorite part of my storyline is when I arrive back at Nancy Botwin’s house (played by Mary Louise Parker). Nobody really expects me to be there and nobody really knows what I want.

Q) Do you have any influence on the storylines that are created for the show?
A) I don’t really want any influence on Jenji Kohan’s storylines because I think she creates is so much fun and so shocking that I could never come up with the things that she comes up with. I really trust her and I trust that she knows the direction of the show and what she wants to do with it.

Q) Why do you think people continue to tune in to watch “Weeds?”
A) We’re completely outrageous and over the top. We also have our pothead viewing audience. We have a lot of different characters that people can relate to on different levels. I think primarily people watch because it is well written and it touches on very specific social hot topics and isn’t afraid to push the envelope.

Q) What would you like to say to everyone who is a fan and supporter of you and your work?
A) Thank you! Keep watching “Weeds” because it’s just going to get better and better and better this season.

Starry Constellation Magazine
Issue: July 2009

 

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The Emmy and Golden Globe nominee Elizabeth Perkins is a happily married mother of four, with a house in the San Fernando Valley. But when Showtime’s Weeds returns next week for a third season, Elizabeth will be back as Celia Hodes, the tightly wound, caustic PTA mom in the offbeat satire about suburban California.

“Celia is about as diametrically opposed to me as she can be,” Perkins assured me. Still, Elizabeth is not exactly your average mom either. Last year, the actress posed in the nude but tastefully (strategic parts all discretely covered) for Allure magazine. What did her children think?

“I’m sure the kids were mixed about it,” she said, “but so do they have mixed feelings about my being on Weeds. I don’t think it’s ever easy being the child of an actor. The magazine was very businesslike and respectful about it. I’m going to be 47 this year and have had absolutely no plastic surgery. They wanted to show that a woman my age can still look like this.”

Also starring in the film Fierce People, due out Sept. 7, Elizabeth seems to be in demand all around.

Not long ago, I read a lovely little magazine essay Perkins had written about the interaction between her teenage daughter Hannah and one of her friends. Turns out, writing is in Elizabeth’s blood.

“My dad used to write for The Saturday Evening Post, Playboy and the Times Mirror Co.,” she told me. “So that’s my secret ambition—to be a writer. I write all the time but don’t show it to anyone.”

Brady’s Bits

Elizabeth was born in New York but moved to her family’s 600-acre farm in Vermont when her parents divorced. “At the time, it was quite a culture shock,” she said. “But it really worked out great.” There, she fell in love with acting after wandering into a little theater at a county fair.

“I was always accused of being the dramatic one in the family,” Elizabeth recalled, “great for throwing myself on the floor. I started hanging around the theater and ended up singing in the chorus of a production of Guys and Dolls. I knew then: These are my people, and this is what I want to do.” In 1988 came her big breakthrough, playing opposite Tom Hanks in Big. Did either suspect Big would be a hit? “Absolutely not,” she said. “Tom said it was going direct to video. But when I saw a final cut, it blew my mind.”

Personal

Born Nov. 18, 1960, in Flushing, N.Y. Married Terry Kinney in 1984. Married to Julio Macat since 2000. Children: Hannah, Maximilian, Alexander and Andreas.

Why You Know Her

She won our hearts in Big (1988); He Said, She Said (1991); The Flintstones (1994); and Must Love Dogs (2005).What You Don’t Know

She loves animals: “I have many pets. One dog is named Buster Brown. The other is Lulu, after the sleepwalking episode in The Honeymooners where Ed Norton is searching for his long lost dog, Lulu.”

 

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Elizabeth Perkins is all mouth and mischief. For fun, she scares the hell out of her cats and records the terror on home videos. When David Letterman caught her wiping her nose on camera, she beamed and suppressed the urge to transfer the bounty of her sinuses onto his sleeve. “It would have been a riot,” she says.

She has even suggested on network interviews that the Bible may have been written by early derelicts with drool problems. Playfulness suits her. As a film actress, she is equally a caution: Her looks smolder, her sensibility froths. In Big, as a corporate harpy with soul, she bounced on Tom Hanks’s trampoline and later sweetly corrupted his virginity. Besides Hanks, she has played the girl to other overgrown boys, such as Jeff (Sweethearts Dance) Daniels and Judge (the upcoming Enid Is Sleeping) Reinhold. She is a gal to the galoots, which should encourage much of mankind. Currently, she appears in Barry Levinson’s Avalon as a first-generation American Jew, even though she is Greek. She recalls, “I said to Barry, ‘Why didn’t you cast a Jew?’ He said, ‘Because you look like a Jew.’ I said, ‘OK.’”

Her house looks like her: bright, elegant, saucy (on display are many antique toys, including her prized set of vintage Old Maid playing cards). We visited the Perkins domicile, tucked into the leafy Los Angeles neighborhood of Hancock Park, where we discovered her amid two cats; her boyfriend, Maurice Phillips, who wrote and directed Enid Is Sleeping; pots of coffee; and the haze of her cigarette smoke, which envelops her always, as though she were a Forties screen goddess, which she could have been and wishes she were. “Joan Crawford,” she says, scoffing a bit. “Not a very good actress. But I love watching her reach for a light. Nobody could touch her there.”

Question 1
PLAYBOY:   Your family name is actually Pisperikos. What brings out the Greek in you?
Elizabeth Perkins:    [Smiles] Sex. When I think Greek, I think of passion and temper. I’m not quick to anger. I’m a builder. But when I finally cross over that line, um, I yell at my boyfriend. I throw and break things. I’ve picked up a forty-five pound chair and hurled it across the room. If there’s one thing human beings are put on this earth to do, it’s to have their egos deflated. And throw chairs.

Question 2
PLAYBOY:   You grew up on a farm in Vermont. Can girls enjoy milking cows as much as men? Give us the udder truth.
Elizabeth Perkins:    Well, an udder is just a large breast. Our farm didn’t have milk cows. But I worked on a dairy farm and milked a cow there. I found it to be extremely wonderful and therapeutic. There’s this symbiosis between the milker and the milkee: Cows have to be milked. And they know that. You’re not going against their will–you’re helping them. So they see you coming. When the milking’s over, they’re very happy, because they are uncomfortable when they need to be milked. It’s comical, because people in America don’t know how to deal with a tit. A tit’s kind of like a big thing in America. A cow teat is just a little bigger.

Question 3
PLAYBOY:   What do your cats know about you that no one else knows?
Elizabeth Perkins:    What I’m like when I cry. My cat Ann responds quicker to my crying than anybody. Cats are people in little fur suits. Ann is sort of confident and sleek and well traveled. Nothing bothers her and she’s there for people. Olive is a bit sickly, strikes out when she’s mad, kind of aloof and not particularly affectionate. She doesn’t do anything well. Sometimes I feel like Ann’s my up days and Olive’s my down days. Most impressive of all, whenever I start whistling the theme to The Andy Griffith Show, Ann’ll come over. [Whistles slowly; Ann slinks over, mewing and nipping at her owner's ankles.] It only works with Mayberry. See, I get these little saliva bites. I think she was Goober in another life.

Question 4
PLAYBOY:   With which of Mayberry’s citizenry do you most closely identify, and why?
Elizabeth Perkins:    Opie. Because it wasn’t Opie’s fault that he was in Mayberry. Everybody else chose to be there, but Opie’s fate was predestined. And Opie always kind of had a wide-eyed vision of life and his innocence was always under siege. Aunt Bee could have left if she wanted. So could Goober. So could Andy. Only Gomer and Barney ever got out.

Question 5
PLAYBOY:   You were once expelled from boarding school. What were your great moments in teen insubordination?
Elizabeth Perkins:    It’s not hard to get expelled from most Eastern boarding schools, especially if you’re born an artist. I was a rebel. I did not attend class regularly. Teachers would ask me questions and I would say, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to answer.” They’d say, “Do you know the answer?” and I’d say, “Yes, but I don’t feel like sharing.” I would do anything for attention, because I was born an actress. I used to hop trains, smoke marijuana in the bathroom, steal English muffins from the dining hall–for which I was suspended. The Northfield Mount Hermon School was a six-thousand-dollar-a-year prep school and they suspended me for stealing English muffins! The only reason I was stealing them was that I wanted to have food in my room so I could study for an exam. Even though I was kicked out, I am now one of the distinguished alumnae. But he big clincher–and my reason for getting kicked out–was a phone call three other girls and I made to the infirmary. We were in the third day of final exams and strung out of coffee and cigarettes. We hated the nurse at the infirmary, because she was this big fat woman, with a Lina Wertmüller look on her face. And she hated all of us. You’d go in with bad period cramps and she’s say [nastily], “Go to gym anyway.” So we called her at three in the morning and I said, “I took this great peyote. The colors are brilliant. I’m so high right now I can’t even see straight. And I love ya! I’d love to look at your fat, smug face.” So we hang up. This woman calls the president of the school at three o’clock in the morning and says, “I think you should have an all-school search. There’s a kid tripping out on drugs and we’ve got to find her.” So everybody’s room is searched–which resulted in about four or five people being busted for having sex, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer. The next day, one of the girls in our foursome felt so guilty that she turned me in. She didn’t turn herself in; she turned me in. And I got blamed for the whole thing. Then I sealed my fate when I was called in to face a dean who had the worst body odor of any man I’ve ever smelled in my life. He was yelling at me and I said, “Well, you know what? This office smells so bad from your body odor I can’t even sit in here. I don’t think you should let me stay in this school. I think you should boot me out on my ass. I think we ought to just call it a day.” It wasn’t until I became successful in acting that my father forgave me for that.

Question 6
PLAYBOY:   You’ve been leading lady to the great galootish guys of film: Tom Hanks, Judge Reinhold, Jeff Daniels. Are you attracted to awkwardness in men? Can goofy be sexy?
Elizabeth Perkins:    I don’t know if I would call them goofy. Most of the men I’ve worked with are vulnerable. They’re childlike, awkward, human. They are not tough guys. They’re not slick like, say, Alec Baldwin. Not that Alec doesn’t have vulnerability, but he projects something a little bit more macho. And I tend to be really attracted to characters who have an edge, but underneath, there’s a real runny yolk. Awkwardness is attractive to any woman. Women’s biggest problem is they desperately try to find the vulnerable side of hard men. A woman finally gets to an age where she says screw that, I’m not going to spend the rest of my life trying to dig something out of a tough guy. Either it’s there or it’s not. They become archaeologists. Klutziness is much more endearing. And more real.

Question 7
PLAYBOY:   Who’s your dream leading galoot?
Elizabeth Perkins:    Oh, Albert Brooks. He’s number one. I understand his neuroses–well, that has a negative connotation. He once said to me at a party, “Why is it when you fall in love, you lose your sense of humor?” I’ll always remember that as The Thing Albert Said. I understood it without his having to explain it to me. Like Shakespeare, Albert has the ability to turn the corner when you don’t think he’s going to. And just when you think he’s heading in that direction, he turns another corner until he keeps spiraling you inward. Albert has the ability in his comedy to keep taking it that one step further when you don’t think anybody can possibly keep taking it that far. And yet he does, with such ease and such realism. He doesn’t let situation die. He wants to explore them to the utmost. He’s sexy because nothing is on the surface to him. Everything goes right to the bone. It goes right through the blood stream. He’s completely intravenous. There’s no beating around the bush in his style. He doesn’t look like Kevin Costner, but that’s why I worship him. Runner-up: Charles Grodin. I love the fact that the world astonishes Charles. He’s a complete victim all the time. Everything’s going on all around him and he just astonishingly goes through the paces of everything that’s being asked of him.

Question 8
PLAYBOY:   You drew attention by turning down the role Madonna played on Broadway in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. What offended you about it that didn’t offend Madonna?
Elizabeth Perkins:    It didn’t offend me. What’s funny about it is I got an enormous amount of publicity for not doing the role–only because Madonna did it. I’m not a raving fan of David Mamet, simply because he doesn’t write roles for women. The role in question–that of an altruistic secretary to a sleazy Hollywood producer–was underwritten. The producer characters abused and tricked her and made fun of her desire to find truth in the movie industry and to get back to the basics in film making. It was extremely cynical. I didn’t want to put myself in that position. Ironically, her character is supposedly the symbolism of purity of the art of moviemaking. The men are symbols of commercial shallowness. So for the casting to include, as the two Hollywood producers, two of America’s foremost stage actors, who are dedicated to their craft, and then Madonna as the symbol of purity was for me a typical David Mamet move. Darkly, darkly cynical. So sue me.

Question 9
PLAYBOY:   As one so accused, explode the myth of the difficult actress, once and for all.
Elizabeth Perkins:    Oh, please. It’s amazing to me that each actress I’ve ever heard was difficult is one of my idols. Like Debra Winger. She’s called difficult. Bette Davis was called difficult. The problem is that women are labeled “difficult” for the same things that men are called “knowing what they want.” I can guarantee you that if De Niro walks onto the set and takes charge of certain things, he is heralded for it. He is a man who knows what he’s talking about, because he’s been around for twenty years; he knows what works, and we should respect his opinion. But I think a lot of directors are threatened by a woman who has an opinion. Unfortunately, a lot of actresses push their weight around in terms of “My trailer’s not big enough,” and that gives everybody a bad name.

Question 10
PLAYBOY:   Name your favorite murderer.
Elizabeth Perkins:    Oh, God, I have a hundred. I don’t want to sound like I have a favorite. But I will say the murderer Ed Gein fascinates me the most. This guy skinned people alive and wore their skins around his house. Moreover, all of his furniture was made from human bones and human skin. He had little drawers of body parts. He had human lamp shades, seat covers, piano benches. The man had completely lost touch with all reality. People might wonder how I could ever be fascinated with a human being like that. I’m fascinated with a human being like that. I’m fascinated with people who kill. What pushes them to that point to take somebody else’s life. To be so out of touch with reality that that horror becomes your reality? I don’t believe that it has anything to do with sociology or upbringing or child abuse, because there are many people who are abused who don’t turn around and make lamp shades out of other people.

Question 11
PLAYBOY:   Is there a trial you would have loved to attend?
Elizabeth Perkins:    Ted Bundy’s. One, because, until the very end, he refused to admit he killed anybody. Two, because he was a law student and through much of his early trials insisted on defending himself. Three, because he described the murders precise detail as if he were the killer–like, “If I were the killer, I would have stabbed her in the upper right forearm and left a two-inch incision”–never admitting that he killed anyone. He’s also a man who, during one of his trials, jumped out of a third-story window and escaped. How a human being could commit murders like that, deny it, go so far as to describe the murders and then defend himself in court is absolutely fascinating. Where does that power come from? How do they view the world? When they are walking down the street, what do they see that we don’t see? What do they feel that we don’t feel?

Question 12
PLAYBOY:   What’s the most fun you can have in a cemetery?
Elizabeth Perkins:    Well, I can’t really say on tape. When I was growing up in Vermont, there were not a lot of places where you could be alone with a boy. Neck in a graveyard? It’s great! There’s something sexy about being there. Most people are afraid of a graveyard at night. But it’s very peaceful and quiet. Nobody’s going to bug you. Actually, on my honeymoon, I took my then-husband on a picnic in my favorite cemetery in Vermont. He thought it was really weird.

Question 13
PLAYBOY:   Where wouldn’t you be caught dead?
Elizabeth Perkins:    At a New Kids on the Block concert.

Question 14
PLAYBOY:   List your three nevers in Hollywood.
Elizabeth Perkins:    That’s hard request. I here are so many. Never become involved with an actor. [Laughs] And I have to say that I divorced one [Terry Kinney]. Never say anything about anybody that you would regret seeing in print. Never insult your agent. Never go to the 7-Eleven without lipstick–somebody will recognize you, then say, “I saw her. And she didn’t look so good. She was at the 7-Eleven buying a pack of cigarettes at three in the morning. Looked bad.” Then you read about it in the Hollywood papers. Never screen your movie before it’s finished. Never assume that people have taste. Never spend all of your time with people in the movie industry. That will screw you up more than anything. And never let the fuckers bring you down.

Question 15
PLAYBOY:   Rob Lowe is a friend of yours. What advice did you give him during his girl trouble?
Elizabeth Perkins:    People always go [shocked], “Rob Lowe is a friend of yours?” You mean the video problem? I offered no advice. I don’t base my friendships on moral judgments. I’m not saying that my friends are allowed to do whatever they want, but I don’t think that what he did was so god-awful that he can no longer be my friend. What happened to him was unfortunate. But what he did, millions of people do; he just got caught and he’s celebrity. I’d like to know how the tape got out in the first place. It seems to me that somebody was counting on an enormous amount of money and publicity. Whoever it was should be slapped on the hand for allowing the tape to be circulated to even one news program. That is a bigger crime than what Rob did, not that what he did was a crime.

Question 16
PLAYBOY:   You played a private dick on the trail of indiscretion in the Alan Rudolph move Love at Large. Have you ever participated in the love espionage as a civilian?
Elizabeth Perkins:    Oh, sure. Let’s face it, everybody has spied for love at one time or another. Nobody just falls into relationships. Nobody ever just lets things happen in love. There’s always a certain amount of manipulation and searching and waiting. You could call it espionage. There’s calling and hanging up when they answer the phone to see if they’re there. There’s driving by their house if you haven’t heard from them. There’s sending cards to see if they respond. Even flirting is manipulation. There’s a certain amount of the underhandedness that goes with the establishment of any love. And that’s not meant in a negative connotation at all. It’s just a love dance.

Question 17
PLAYBOY:   What would be your tips for the Under-Thirty Divorce Survival Guide?
Elizabeth Perkins:    I’ve been divorced about a year and a half and single for three years. It’s not easy. I didn’t date for the first full year of separation. And he did, within the first month. So it’s just the way two people react. I spent an enormous amount of time alone. Moved up to a house in the hills and never went out or accepted a dinner invitation with anyone. Couldn’t handle it.
The best thing you can do for yourself if you are going through a divorce is to always remember that you love that person. If you deny that you ever loved the person you are divorcing, you will send yourself into a frenzy and hurt yourself more. It’s almost like saying it never happened, and that’s bad. You were married to that person for a reason. You loved him at a certain time. Accept that you loved him and that you probably still do. It doesn’t mean that you can talk on the phone. It doesn’t mean that you can have dinner with him. Something dies and you go through a mourning. Except the weird thing is that he’s still alive, and that’s what you’ve got to accept. He’s still alive, he’s still part of your life, and you will always have that. You can’t deny that it was there. That’s dangerous. It’s unfair to both of you.

Question 18
PLAYBOY:   Let’s reflect in the classic scene in Big where Tom Hanks, as a transformed adolescent, feels up your breast for the first time. Off camera, who took hold of the situation, as it were?
Elizabeth Perkins:    Tom, the director, Penny Marshall, and I spent the afternoon on that one. I don’t think there are too many other directions who would have handled it as wonderfully as Penny did.
The first thing we decided on was that you would not see the breast, because then people would have been looking only at the breast, not at the scene. Second, she decided to play it as a wide two-shot instead of focusing on Tom or on me–or focusing on the breast with a close-up shot of his hand in action. Tom–and I have to hand it to him–made the decision not to play it lasciviously. He sat down and said, “OK, how does my hand actually touch the breast? Does it bang it back and forth?” And we all decided that he would display almost an extreme admiration and awe for her body, versus a woweee! kind of response, which would involve exaggerated squeezing and bobbing. And he kept the light on. That’s what made it work as tastefully and as poignantly as it did. And then he made the choice to kiss me, instead of feeling my buttocks or something stupid.

Question 19
PLAYBOY:   You’ve been making a movie called He Said, She Said, which deals with the disparate ways men and women view the world. So tell us: What do women see in everyday life that men don’t?
Elizabeth Perkins:    Women are quick to notice smaller things, whereas men focus on the bigger picture. You don’t see a lot of men who sit around and do jigsaw puzzles. Men will look at the puzzle when it’s finished and paint the back and hang it. But women will be the ones who sit at the table and put it together. In the movie, scenes are told from the two points of view. And sometimes, the scenes are completely different, which is so true. Same place, same time, same clothing–totally different scenes where each of us hears completely different dialog. It’s like going back and rehashing a fight with a friend: “But you said you never wanted to see me again.” No, I didn’t.” Men, of course, can never remember real-life conversations verbatim and women can, blow by blow. Men see the over-all picture. Women can remember every safety pin that was on their skirt hem.

Question 20
PLAYBOY:   What can you do well that few people suspect you can do at all?
Elizabeth Perkins:    I can move my right pinkie toe independently–to the side, forward and back–without moving any of my other toes. It doesn’t come in handy, but very few people actually know this about me. It’s very hard to do. Also, I can play the piano without reading music. Pretty well, if I may add. Never had a lesson in my life. I’m afraid to have a lesson. I’m afraid I’ll lose whatever talent I have. Oh, and I can blow smoke rings out my ass. Just kidding.

 

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I WAS HELPING MY FRIEND PLANT HERBS IN HER BACK-yard garden one perfect, smog-free Los Angeles Wednesday, and I had just patted down the soil around a bunch of basil when I heard the sound of a lawn mower. At the far end of the property, I saw a very small person pushing a very large machine.

I said to my friend, “Is that a child?”

Whoever it was continued to mow the lawn, moving closer to us, and we confirmed that it was indeed a young girl. Clear, open face, deep-set eyes, long chestnut hair in two neat braids. My friend’s new gardener told us the girl was his 14-year-old daughter, Alicia. She was born in Mexico and spoke little English.

“Why isn’t she in school?” we asked.

“She has to work,” he said. “To support the family.” Then he patiently explained his predicament: Of course he would love for Alicia to spend her days in school, but money was scarce and sometimes everyone had to work so that they could all survive.

For a while, I stood on the lawn, watching Alicia. She was carrying bags of mulch and digging holes with heavy shovels. Eventually, she took a break and sat on the grass to eat a sandwich she’d brought. I thought of my daughter, the same age, dressed in her brand-name jeans, leaving science class, laughing with her friends. Although this wasn’t news–that there are children in this country who cannot get the education that is their only hope of improving their state, while others have every advantage imaginable–the stark contrast, the terrific unfairness of it, took my breath away.

When my daughter got back from school, she started to complain about her homework.

“Come with me,” I said, and we went down the street to meet Alicia. I told my daughter that Alicia had been working in the garden with her father most of the day.

“Why aren’t you in school?” my daughter asked her.

“Because this is what I do,” Alicia said. My daughter nodded slowly.

As I went inside to say hello to my friend, I noticed my daughter follow Alicia to the front of the house. And then they began to move plants together. I couldn’t hear their voices, but I could see them talking as they worked, fumbling for words and giggling. For a second, through that window, they looked like a couple of best friends doing chores outside, having fun on a lovely California afternoon–not strangers from vastly different backgrounds trying to comprehend each other’s situation. It was an ordinary scene, but I wondered why it was only a “scene.” Why couldn’t it simply be ordinary? Why should two 14-year-old girls have such disparate hopes for a future?

I realized that afternoon that while it’s important to be thankful for how fortunate I’ve been, it’s even more pressing that I take things in with a broader perspective. As a person, as a citizen, it’s my duty to ensure that Alicia enjoy the same rights as my daughter; she mustn’t be denied the chance to pursue her dreams. It falls to me as the granddaughter of Greek immigrants to call my political representatives, to rally in support of immigrants’ rights when I can. It’s my responsibility to extend the wealth of opportunity I’ve been given by this country to those just beginning their fight here.

Right now America is grappling with its “immigrant problem.” I struggled with it, too. But I know where I stand. This country’s history is bound up with migrants and refugees who fought through prejudice and carved out their version of the American dream. Now is no different. And where better to learn that lesson than in my own backyard?

Elizabeth Perkins plays sardonic mom Celia Hodes in the Golden Globe-winning Showtime series Weeds, which returns for its second season on August 14 at 10 P.M.

The Oprah Magazine
Issue: August 2006

 

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October 11, 2001 -Elizabeth Perkins sounds tentative as she begins to talk about her role in Showtime’s “What Girls Learn.”

It’s not the film’s subject — a mother and her family coping with breast cancer — that she stumbles over. Her uneasiness is about promoting a project, any project, in the shadow of terrorism and war.

She decided to go ahead, she explains, because of the health issue’s importance and because the film can help draw attention to the fact that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

“Women are still going to die of breast cancer,” Perkins said bluntly. It’s the second-leading cause of cancer death in women, after lung cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.

Early detection is crucial, Perkins said, reminding herself aloud to schedule her own mammogram. She noted that Friday, Oct. 19, has been designated National Mammography Day, with discounted or free tests offered by participating radiologists.

The actress (“Big,” “28 Days”) was drawn to “What Girls Learn” in part because she recently lost her best friend of 20 years to cancer.

Her friend was much like the buoyant character Perkins plays in the Showtime film (8 p.m. EDT Sunday, Oct. 14). “She was incredibly filled with life and cherished every day she had,” the actress said.

“What Girls Learn,” drawn from a real family’s story, focuses less on disease and more on the relationship between a young mother, Frances (Perkins), her daughters Tilden (Alison Pill) and Elizabeth (Tamara Hope) and the new man (Scott Bakula) in their lives.

It’s a tender, delicately etched coming-of-age portrait of the oldest girl, Tilden, and of the complicated relationship that even the most loving and devoted parent has with a child. It’s skillfully directed by Lee Rose (“A Girl Thing,” “The Truth About Jane”).

Based on Karin Cook’s book “What Girls Learn,” about her mother’s illness and its effect on her and younger sister Jennifer, the film is airing under the “Showtime Original Picture for All Ages” umbrella.

The monthly movies are intended for family viewing and discussion.

In the drama, set in early 1980s on New York’s Long Island, single mom Frances has uprooted her girls to start a new life with Nick (Bakula). She’s an unusual fictional mother: Supportive of her children but not self-effacing.

“It was exactly the kind of mother these girls needed if they were going to lose her, because what she taught them was you can stand up for yourself; it’s gonna be OK,” said Perkins. “You are strong people.”

It’s hard for Tilden, 13, struggling with adolescence and her mom’s illness, to believe that: She makes her kindly new stepdad a target for her sullen anger. Jennifer, 12, with an optimistic heart to match her mother’s, turns to prayer.

“The little one wants to grow up just like Frances and believes all the magic their mother tries to weave,” Rose said. “Tilden is madly in love with her mother but doesn’t buy all that. She just can’t get beyond her brain to accept everything her mother says at face value.”

The mom tries, bravely, to shield her children from the disease’s cruelty. Perkins understands her character’s effort.

“It’s like the way I’m dealing with the issue of the attacks with my 10-year-old daughter,” Perkins said. “You need to decipher what they can handle.”

Unlike her character, however, Perkins said she wouldn’t be able to hold back so much about an illness.

“But I think it was reminiscent of the time that it took place and how little we knew about chemotherapy and cancer, how little we knew about communication. In the 1940s, people used to whisper when they said the word cancer.”

In one scene, a discomfited Frances hesitates when daughter Tilden asked to see her mastectomy scar, then finally complies.

Director Rose said she wanted to make sure the film’s tenderness was coupled with the tough reality of illness and grief. In other scenes, the daughters are wracked by sobs.

“I want it to be as painful as the experience is,” Rose said. “I want the mourning to be as painful as mourning is. We had debates about this. Some of the men thought I may have taken it too far … I said `No, I didn’t. I want to see that.”

Like Perkins, Rose finds world events and tragedies uppermost in her mind. She said she hopes the film provides a chance for a good cry — and more.

“What the movie reminds you of, and what we have to be reminded of, is to remember people and how they lived, not how they died. What we need to remember is we’re lucky to have people in our lives, however briefly.”

 

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She looks like the snottiest girl anyone ever asked to dance. And it’s not just the cigarette, the Marlene Dietrich outfit, or the kiss-off-buster lipstick. It’s that “I dare you” gaze- the ice-maiden equivalent of “Go ahead, make my day.” But then, that’s Elizabeth Perkins’s come-on.

All her characters start out brittle and snide, only to melt spectacularly into the arms of the most unlikely conquistadors- slobby Jim Belushi in About Last Night…, twinkly Tom Hanks in Big, and now the dweeby high school principal played by Jeff Daniels in the puppyish new movie Sweet Hearts Dance.

The Perkins Melt-it’s among the loveliest of Hollywood’s obscure pleasures. Would Tom Hank’s performance in Big be so widely regarded as Oscar fodder were it not for Perkins mellowing eloquently at his side, were it not for her feathery brows going circumflex in the face of his boyish bons mots, were it not for the contrite, almost confessional way she licks an ugly gob of mustard off the corner of her mouth in the carnival scene? And even in the hapless Sweet Hearts Dance, Perkins comprehends her wee slip of a character through and through.

As a schoolteacher named Adie, she’s often slack-jawed, but Perkins can make a lolling mandible as seductive as her fishnets; at the bottom of her long, boxy face, slack-jawed means smart, means avid, means primed. Which Perkins plainly is.

Vanity Fair Magazine
Issue: October 1988

 

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The way Jenji Kohan tells it, she created “Weeds” because she was tired of working in black-and-white TV.

This may seem like a peculiar thing for a woman in her mid-30s to say. But Kohan, whose writing and producing credits include “Gilmore Girls,” “Will & Grace” and “Mad About You,” isn’t talking about the Eisenhower era. “I was looking for a subject where I could explore (life’s) gray areas,” something she’d been unable to do in network comedies, Kohan told TV critics earlier this year at a Los Angeles gathering to promote her half-hour comedy for premium cable’s Showtime channel

“And the other thing was this notion in psychology called ‘postconventional morality,’ where if you’re not operating within the confines of society’s morals, you have to develop your own moral code. I was searching for a kind of vehicle for that. “There had been a lot of magazine articles about the drug dealer next door, and pot just seemed like a good entrée into the whole thing. And after that the pilot just sort of flowed out.”

What flowed was the tale of Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker, “The West Wing”), a mother of two whose upper-middle-class life in fictitious Agrestic, Calif., is shaken by a domestic earthquake: the sudden death of her husband, the family’s sole wage earner.

When the ground stops trembling, Nancy decides that, to keep gas in the Range Rover and soccer uniforms on her kids’ backs, she’ll have to go into business for herself.

Lacking job skills but a pragmatic sort of person, she decides to deal in a commodity in short supply and great demand in her suburban community: marijuana.

One of her best customers is Doug Wilson (Kevin Nealon, “Saturday Night Live”), an easygoing, cheerfully cynical city councilman who’s also Nancy’s accountant. Another is Dean Hodes (Andy Milder), whose wife, Celia (Elizabeth Perkins, “Must Love Dogs”), is the president of the P.T.A. and, in the eyes of many, Agrestic’s perfect mom.

Needless to say, this perfection goes about as deep as the lacquer on Celia’s nails. “There’s always a reason why somebody becomes so closed off and so insular,” Perkins said of her character. “I happen to think she’s just holding it all together because underneath it there’s a lot of chaos and a lot of cracks in the plaster.” Parker was intrigued by Nancy’s do-it-yourself moral code.

In an early episode, for example, the character reluctantly sells pot to Doug’s teenage son – but only on the condition that he not resell it to younger kids. “I just liked the world that (Kohan) created,” Parker said. “I thought it was unapologetically dark and the morality of it was skewed from the beginning, so you can’t necessarily make judgments on the characters.

“A lot of times on TV, (a character) is the same person at the top of the show as they are at the end. It doesn’t leave you asking anything. You sort of feel like you know it already.”

Kohan is well aware that some people will have only one question about the show: How dare she make a drug dealer a sympathetic character, a widowed mom who’s nicer to Celia’s children than Celia is?

But that’s just the point, in the writer’s mind: It’s worth asking whether Nancy’s business enterprise is really so heinous.

“I like pot as a subject because it seems to be kind of the mild end of this whole drug debate,” Kohan said, adding that the dispute over the medical use of marijuana added a contemporary political charge.

She went on: “Personally, it’s not my drug. I don’t really enjoy it. But I did a lot of research, and as a political issue, I’m perfectly comfortable saying I believe that it should probably be legalized, regulated and taxed.”

Given her subject matter, Kohan – who has written for two HBO series, “Sex and the City” and “Tracey Takes On . . . ” – said she didn’t even try pitching “Weeds” to any of the broadcast networks.

Her experience last year creating and producing a conventional sitcom – CBS’ now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t “The Stones” – was not a happy one.

In Kohan’s view, “the networks really operate within this culture of fear. They have advertisers to answer to. They need a hit.”

“They are very dependent on the past. You know, ‘This worked, so it should work again.’

“Showtime just said, ‘Go,’ and it was the greatest thing they could have said to me.” Kohan was looking for a change of style as well as subject.

Like most cable comedies, “Weeds” has no laugh track, and she doesn’t miss it. “It’s a struggle to have to come up with a certain number of jokes per page,” she says of some of the comedies in her past.

“The sitcom form is very specific. It limits you to have to ‘button’ every scene, (to have) your actor in a certain place (on the stage).”

Of course, Kohan realizes that her desperate housewife – a soccer mom who gets her kicks in ways not addressed in the family Christmas letter – will be compared to the famous ones on the No. 1 broadcast network, ABC.

“We shot (the pilot) before ‘Desperate Housewives’ aired,” she said in response to a question.

“It definitely dovetails with a lot of themes from ‘Desperate Housewives,’ but I think it’s a different situation. They were two different animals that were just kind of co-existing at the same time.”

After tonight’s 10 o’clock premiere, Showtime will air each episode of “Weeds” twice each night on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 9 and 9:30 p.m.

 

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Quicker than you can ask, “Whatever happened to that woman who was in that movie where Tom Hanks dances on the giant piano?”, a reader checks in with a tidbit from last night’s premiere party for the new Showtime series Weeds:

Robert Greenblatt (head of Showtime), gave a speech to the audience before the show. He pointed out Elizabeth Perkins, a member of the cast, and cited a review of her performance, saying:”This is Elizabeth Perkins’ best work since Big.”

You could hear a pin drop in the audience as everyone contemplated what it was like to be pointed out for not having done a single thing worth bragging about in fifteen years.

Awkward! But don’t be so hard on the guy, he obviously meant to highlight the quality of Perkins’ work in Weeds, not embarrassingly overlook the 17 years and 35 IMDb entries that passed between his network’s new show and Big. We’re sure the fruitbasket he’s sending with a note recognizing her noted turn as Wilma Flintstone will be more than enough to soothe any inadvertently bruised egos.

 

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Elizabeth Perkins, costar of a comedy about suburbanites and marijuana, says red wine is her drug of choice.

“I haven’t really smoked dope in years,” says Perkins, nominated yesterday for a Golden Globe for her performance in Showtime’s Weeds. “It always made me kind of paranoid and sweaty and self-conscious.”

Perkins’ character, Celia, doesn’t smoke, either. Her friend, Nancy (Globe-nominated star Mary-Louise Parker), sells weed to support her family after her husband’s unexpected death in their mythical, cookie-cutter town of Agrestic, Calif. The acclaimed Weeds, on the bubble for most of its rookie season, was renewed yesterday for 12 episodes, starting this summer.

“I was holding my breath,” says Perkins, whose credits include Must Love Dogs and Finding Nemo. “But after being in the business 20 years, I don’t worry as much as I used to. I just assumed they’d be crazy not to.”

Still, networks “will take shows off at the drop of a hat. Even if a show’s been nominated for 10 Emmys, there’s no guarantee.” (See Development, Arrested.) Playing the uptight, weight-obsessed, alcoholic Celia is a blast, Perkins, 45, says. “In your 20s and 30s, you’re trying to establish yourself. You want meaty roles. Once you hit 40, you just want to have a good time.”

Perkins compares Weeds to “a stoned Desperate Housewives.” Weeds has “real women in an unreal world”; Housewives has “unreal women in a real world.” Speaking of unreal, it’s weird for Perkins when Celia constantly criticizes her young daughter about her weight.

“My whole family has a really healthy take on body image. We don’t buy into that whole thing. I have a young daughter [Hannah, 14]. She’s a dancer. She’s not starving herself.”

At 5-foot-8 and 140 pounds, Perkins is “a big woman,” she says, especially in a town where actresses are expected to wear doll-size clothing. “For Celia to harp on her daughter when she’s not a thin, pristine woman makes it that much more horrible. I’m not practicing what I preach.”

Perkins was clearly out of practice when the phone rang at 5:45 a.m. yesterday with news of her Globe nomination. “I had no idea they were being announced. I’ve been busy cleaning my garage the last couple of days.” .

 

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Jul 27, 2005 - Whether you use internet dating, as Diane Lane’s character does in the new romantic comedy Must Love Dogs, zero in on someone across a crowded room, or get fixed up by friends or family, the search for that perfect someone can be heaven… or hell. Just ask actresses Diane Lane and Elizabeth Perkins who play sisters in the film. Hey, that’s just what we did. Both of these dating horror stories (can’t believe they were willing to tell us) just cry out ‘hey, top this!!’ Oddly, both stories have to do with bodily functions….

TeenHollywood: So, ladies, tell us about your worst date ever!

Diane Lane: Well I was the date from hell. I was young and can use that as an excuse. I went to a rock concert on a blind date. My grandmother set me up with somebody in Texas, she’s a Texan. I just wanted to go to the concert and we drove there in his car. I think it was Billy Squire opening for Queen – oh my God! They serve these really huge Texas sized drinks and I had one. I was wearing leather pants and was kind of sweaty and sticky and I’m not used to leather pants. Actually I think it was the last time I ever wore leather pants.
Anyway, the concert’s over and everyone is leaving and I really needed to go to the bathroom. I’m carrying around this huge bucket sized container and I’m thinking this is possible, I can do this. I asked the gentleman if he would allow me to go in the car and pull down the leather pants and went into that huge trough – you can’t hold it in one hand, it’s so big. Texas size, right. Everything was fine until I had to pull the pants up and I knocked the bucket over (laughter). And I wiped it up with the t-shirts from the concert. And I never told him and I can only imagine what it smelled like the next day!

TeenHollywood: I take it he never called you again.

Diane; No he didn’t. That’s really sad.

Elizabeth Perkins: My sister had a really good date from hell story. She went on this scuba diving trip by herself and there was this guy on the trip by himself as well and he was this really obnoxious guy and, secretly, he told everybody that they were together and he was sitting next to her all the time so everybody assumed that they were. The first day they were out on the scuba boat, he came down with diarrhea and had to be held over the side of the boat so he could [poop] as the boat was moving along.

[We say OMG!] Everybody thought my sister was with this loser and it wasn’t until they were getting on the plane to come home that the other people on the boat said ‘well, how long have you been together?’ This is the guy they hung out of the boat while he….whooo one of those guys. She had no idea that the entire boat thought they were a couple. Then… he asked for her phone number! She’s like ‘you know what? Don’t think so’!

 

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April 1989 – IMAGINE: Aphrodite and Clytemnestra and Medusa and Leda and Antigone, all living within one woman like blood relatives. Each fights her way to the surface at unexpected intervals. The consequences are always unpredictable.

The first time I beheld Betsy was onstage in Chicago in a play of mine called Gardenia. Wait till you see her, the director had said. She’s too young for the part. She’s never played a lead. She’s great. I came into the theater during dress rehearsal. The membrane between role and actress did not exist. She just was the part. Fierce. Funny. A beauty. And Mine.

I traveled a lot by air last fall, and Big repeated on four flights. I kept looking at up fro my book to stare at the woman on the jiggling screen. Who was she? Back on earth, I searched out an ad to learn she was… Elizabeth Perkins! Why hadn’t I recognized her? She belonged to me, for a while. But she was Betsy then. Now, well, she was always a woman who could transform herself.

I tracked her down. I guess I had to. Turns out Betsy spent the last year not working, holed up alone by the beach writing mysterious fables of women in various drastic situations. A woman sailing. A woman in a war. A woman underwater. No one has seen these stories, these myths. But trust me. They’ll show up. Her imagination has already begun to add those women to her face. Medea. Circe. Penelope. Try to imagine the reality of being involved with all at the same time. Worth the chance.

 

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SELLER: Elizabeth Perkins and Julio Macat
BUYER: Soleil Moon Frye and Jason Goldberg
LOCATION: S. Lucerne Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $3,200,000
SIZE: 4,082 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: Look forward to seeing you at this renowned, gated 1918 Spanish w/ Moroccan artifacts throughout. This stunning 4 bed, 3.5 bath Windsor Square estate w/ pool + sep full guest house has many original details. Other features include 4 fireplaces, sun porch, court yard, balconies, outdoor BBQ sitting area & outdoor shower. Garage converted to play room w/ incredible guest house above + big yard & more–all on a great block walking distance to Larchmont.

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Children, Your Mama know this transaction dates back to the stone ages of 2006, so this is O.L.D. old news for some of the children. So if y’all already know about this house or read celebrity real estate doyenne Ruth Ryon’s write up on this property in her Hot Properties column in the LA Times way back in November of 2006, then just sit down and shut up. Your Mama is too bizzy and in no mood to mess with a bunch of whiners who want to gripe about old news.

We have decided to discuss this property for two reasons, the first of which is because Your Mama loves us some Elizabeth Perkins, the flame headed actress who masterfully plays the bitterly hostile and wonderfully acerbic Celia Hodes on the Showtime’s Weeds program. The second reason is that Miz Ryon failed to mention a few additional celebrity connections regarding this Hancock Park house that Your Mama thinks the children might find inneresting.

Back in January of 1999, Miz Perkins was a single mommy actress who paid $1,175,000 for this 4,082 square foot Moroccan/Mediterranean mishmash in Hancock Park. What was not mentioned in Ms. Ryon’s column at the time was that the actress purchased the property from the offbeat, talented, and once sexy Oscar nominated actor John Malkovich who, according to property records, purchased the property in 1991 for $1,025,000

Not long after the lovely Miz Perkins purchased the 4 bedroom 3.5 bathroom house, she married cinematographer Julio Macat (Home Alone 1, 2, and 3, The Nutty Professor, Wedding Crashers). Another interesting celebrity factoid not mentioned by Miz Ryon is that the Perkins/Macats sold the house in August of 2006 to former child actor Soleil Moon Frye, whom ya’ll probably best remember as the cute as a button orphan Punky Brewster, and her huzband, Punk’d producer Jason Goldberg. Interestingly, the Boobster and Mister Goldberg paid $3,200,000 for the property, which was considerably more than the asking price which listing information shows was $2,895,000.

On a side note, the Boobster and Mister Goldberg had previously lived, and according to property records continue to own, a 3,300 square foot, 4 bedroom and 5 bathroom house on Hollyridge Drive in the Beachwood Canyon neighborhood. Sources tell Your Mama that the couple had recently leased the Hollyridge Drive house to P-Diddy baby mama Kim Porter. That is until, in the aftermath of their bust up, when sources tell Your Mama that she moved  a luxe gated development in  the suburban wilds of Calabasas. We are looking to confirm this because Calabasas, as nice as all the residents of Calabasas with say it is, seems like such a lackluster location for the Diddy heirs to be raised.

Anyhoo, the former Malkovich/Perkins home on S. Lucerne Boulevard, now home base for the Boobster and Mister Goldberg, sits in a tony section of Hancock Park just a few short walking distance blocks to the charming and small town style Larchmont Village shopping district. Your Mama knows that no fool even walks to the mail box in Los Angeles, let alone a few short blocks to the Café du Village for a bite to eat. However, Your Mama likes the idea of at least having the option to walk to the magazine shop for the daily paper even though we’d probably still drive our big BMW and then gleefully complain about parking difficulties.

We’re not much for the British imperialist decor in the living and dining rooms. We bow down at the feet of Miz Perkins the actor, but we’re not so laudatory of her interior design skills and hope she’s rung up up a nice gay decorator to help her do up her current digs, which we understand are in Sherman Oaks.

Although Your Mama is a fan of quirky and interesting architecture, the front facade of this house looks a little too much like a lighthouse for our personal taste. We are, however, utterly and completely grooving on the Moroccan pissoirs with their white stucco walls, crazy shaped windows and gorgeous green and blue tile work, particularly the mosaic tile on the bathtub. Your can make fun of Your Mama all you want, but we LOVE a bidet. Most American think bidets are freaky and unnecessary, but Your Mama appreciates an apparatus that ensures that we stay clean and washed down there.

The pictures we have do not adequately show the magnificent oval swimming pool in the back yard or the detached guest house. All the children know by now that Your Mama loves a guest house almost as much as we love a gated driveway, and the Malkovich/Perkins/Frye house does not disappoint with it’s guest house located on top of the garage at the rear of the property. According to the listing information, the garage itself has been converted to a “play room.” Lawhd children, Your Mama would never sacrifice a garage for a “play room.” Let the damn children play in their bedrooms for chrissakes.

Speaking of children, the Boobster and Mister Goldberg have recently birthed a child who they gave the questionable name of Poet. Your Mama wonders, what if she grows up to be a painter? Poet the painter? Hmm. Well, given that Your Mama is not a fan of other people’s children, we really don’t care what sort of name trauma Poet may suffer in her adolescence, but we imagine she’s going to grow up to be an esoterically minded lady with a cat name Dolly and an advanced college degree from a good college on the Easten Seaboard.

Your Mama wishes both the Perkins/Macats and the Moon Frye/Goldbergs happy homes.

Source

 

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October 27, 1990 – NEW YORK “Avalon,” now in its second week at 14 theaters in the Chicago area, is a lyrical, deeply moving memory movie about three generations in the lives of an immigrant family.

The Krichinskys are Russian Jews, but two key characters from the film’s middle generation are played by Irish-American actor Aidan Quinn and Greek-American actress Elizabeth Perkins, whose grandparents left Salonika in the 1920s. Their name was Pisperikos.

In a way, that’s what “Avalon” is about.

Perkins is best known for her radiant performance opposite Tom Hanks in “Big,” She was born in Flushing, N.Y., and moved to Brattleboro, Vt., as a young girl, after her parents divorced.

 

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November 9, 1986 – Do not be fooled by the young woman in the ruffled petticoat, the free-flowing seafoam green tunic, the ankle-high Victorian style boots, and the headful of wild brunet curls. Actress Elizabeth Perkins may look like the French Lieutenant’s woman, but she has the instincts of a firebrand, and the determination of a pioneering homesteader.

She is, in fact, an intriguing blend of the two fictional characters that have brought her the most attention: Lydie Breeze, the free-spirited 19th century romantic heroine of John Guare’s play “Gardenia,” the role she played at the Goodman in 1982, and Joan Gunther, the hard-as-nails young single she portrayed in “About Last Night”.

 

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October 23, 1990 – NEW YORK “Avalon,” now in its first week at 15 theaters in the Chicago area, is a lyrical, deeply moving memory movie about three generations in the lives of an immigrant family.

The Krichinskys are Russian Jews, but two key characters from the film’s middle generation are played by Irish-American actor Aidan Quinn and Greek-American actress Elizabeth Perkins, whose grandparents left Salonika in the 1920s. Their name was Pisperikos.

In a way, that’s what “Avalon” is about.

Best known for her radiant performance opposite Tom Hanks in “Big,” Perkins was born in Flushing, N.Y. She moved to Brattleboro, Vt., as a young girl, after her parents divorced.

“I’m really a country girl”.

 

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It doesn’t take Einstein to notice that Elizabeth Perkins is out of place in her first few films.

It’s a simple case of the good-actor/bad-movie syndrome, with Perkins adding a touch of class to the otherwise forgettable Sweet Heart’s Dance, From the Hip and About Last Night…

In the splendid Big, she finally landed a role to suit her abilities. But Tom Hanks is the one who gets to play around with his age, when Perkins’ looks and demeanor fairly beg for the chance to move back in time. There’s something about her that’s old-fashioned. You can picture her as the femme fatale in some classic, shadow-drenched film noir or as the wise-cracking dame in a screwball comedy. Perhaps that’s why she seems most at home in Alan Rudolph’s new Love At Large, a Raymond Chandler-esque tale of romance between two bungling detectives, which, like most Rudolph films, has the feel of another time.

With the thick eyebrows and expressive brown eyes, Perkins has a gutsy 1940’s style. She’s the down-to-earth girl next door who becomes more attractive the more you get to know her. Character, intelligence and a basic goodness enhance her looks. Imagine a 1990’s version of Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday and you’ve got a bead on the kind of spell she casts – smart, classy, spunky, tough and independent, yet vulnerable.

In most of her early films, Perkins’ characters hide their emotions behind a cool veneer. You’d be hard-pressed to consider her wisecracking Joan Gunther in About Last Night… as anything other than bitter and possessive. But rather than haphazard, one-dimensional portrait of a bitch, Perkins convincingly show’s how Joan’s anger stems from the loneliness and frustration of a woman caught among the wolves of Chicago’s singles scene.

In Sweet Heart’s Dance, Perkins’ grade school teacher Adie Nims hides behind verbal smoke screens. When her goofy boyfriend, Sam Manners (Jeff Daniels), proposes, she quickly brushes him off: “I believe that life is an endless highway,” she says, laughing nervously. “And what I am is a bus, and I’m chuggin’ down the highway and boys – and men – climb on me, and they get off and I keep going. And I keep thinking, someday I’m gonna have to let someone sit up front with me and look through my window and share my ride.” Soon thereafter, however, she chucks her schoolbooks into the backseat to make room for her dufus, leaving us to wonder why the partners this grade-A woman ends up with always seem like booby prizes.

Appropriately, Perkins’ extremes in Big are even greater, as her Susan Lawrence transforms from an uptight marketing executive into Josh Baskin’s (Tom Hanks) sexy, generous lover. At first, she falls for Josh so she can ride his coattails to the top, but then his youthful exuberance and innocence win her over. On their memorable first date, Susan bounces vigorously on Josh’s trampoline wearing a short black evening dress.

In Love At Large, Perkins’ Stella Wynkowski is a hard-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside private eye who resists the advances of frog-voiced detective Harry Dobbs (Tom Berenger). She keeps her emotions locked behind bonded-steel armor but occasionally lets rip a revealing nugget like, “The one in love always waits.” Fortunately, when stripped of her protective shell this time around, Perkins finds herself face-to-face with a good guy.

Perkins often engages in what Vanity Fair’s Stephen Schiff dubs “the Perkins Melt”- from toughie to softie. It’s her way of making characters real. “Nobody is just a hard-ass,” says Perkins, dressed in head-to-toe black and white, save a swath of red lipstick. “There is never a person who is just an asshole or just evil. No matter what Bette Davis was doing there was always a moment you saw her character unsure of herself. All of her women, whenever they were hard, there was always that moment when she wasn’t sure if hard was the best way to be. What gives that toughness so much more strength is the weakness. That’s what makes it so much more interesting.”

That’s also what makes Perkins alluring to men and women alike. Men like her combination of brains, beauty and brassiness. For those exact reasons, women consider her worthy of emulation. Plus, she’s not going to trade her female friends up the river just so she can land a guy. She invests a lot in her same-sex friendships. In Love At Large, for instance, she risks her job and her life to rush to the aid of a browbeaten wife. Her reason for consoling a bawling Kate Capshaw is simple: “I’m a woman,” she explains sympathetically.
Perkins, who turns 30 this November, hasn’t yet had a chance to truly strut her stuff. Thankfully, meatier roles lie ahead. Her first top billing, a black comedy called Enid Is Sleeping, is completed, but it’s stuck in Vestron hell, awaiting purchase by a distributor. And this fall will se the release of a Barry Levinson’s Avalon, in which Perkins plays the mother of a first-generation immigrant family in Baltimore.
Born in Queens, New York, to a concert-pianist mother and writer-editor father, Perkins grew up in her grandmother’s farmhouse outside of Brattleboro, Vermont. After high school, she studied at Chicago’s Goodman School of Drama before moving to New York, where she worked off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons and the Ensemble Studio Theater. Her big break came when she landed a lead in the Broadway production of Brighton Beach Memoirs.  Less than two years later, she was in the movies.

In person, Perkins can be intimidating. She has definite opinions and makes no bones about expressing them. Some interpret that as being “difficult.” “A few people have heard that I was very demanding in terms of what I want,” she says, “so I’ve become ‘hard to work with.’ But that’s really unfair. All you’re doing is trying to put in your creative input so you’re not just flouncing around like some bimbo. It’s very frustrating because I’m not a robot. You don’t turn me on and I do my little job, and you shut me off and put me in my trailer. That’s not the way I operate. If that’s the kind of actress you want, then you shouldn’t cast me.”

American Film Magazine
Issue: May 1990

 

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Despite the seeming existential crisis, Elizabeth Perkins knows exactly who she is — and how she got there. ”I probably could have been more famous, if that’s what I wanted to do,” she says, without a hint of wistfulness. Instead of following up 1991′s He Said, She Said with more leading roles (”I was above the title on my first movie [1986's About Last Night...]”), Perkins opted to spend time raising her daughter, Hannah, now 14. ”They grow up really fast and then they’re gone,” she explains. ”If you miss it, you miss it. You don’t get a second chance.”

This is the part of the story where we’re supposed to say that Elizabeth Perkins is getting a second chance, thanks to her surprisingly dark turn as a very desperate housewife in Showtime’s new pot dramedy, Weeds(Mondays, 10 p.m.). Her character, Celia Hodes, is one twisted mother. To the outside world of fictional Agrestic, Calif., she’s the perfect PTA head and devoted soccer mom. Inside the walls of her manicured home, however, she’s a parent who replaces her slightly chunky daughter’s secret stash of chocolate with laxatives. When the poor girl has an explosive episode in class, Celia isn’t the least bit repentant. Upon hearing that the kids now call her daughter ”S— Girl,” Celia responds: ”It’s better than them calling her fat.”

That ability to twist and hone a line so sharp that it stabs you through the TV set is just one reason why we’re having an Elizabeth Perkins moment. ”You look at her on the screen and she steals the show half the time,” says Jenji Kohan, the Will & Grace veteran who created Weeds. More thievery is occurring everywhere you turn: In Must Love Dogs, Perkins stars as Diane Lane’s sister; and in Speak, she plays the self-involved mom of a troubled teen (premieres on Lifetime and Showtime at 9 p.m., Sept. 5). Next up: Paul Reiser’s The Thing About My Folks (opening Sept. 16) and a cameo in the teen film Kids in America (opening in October).

But it’s not as if the woman who let a young Tom Hanks (okay, technically it was a young David Moscow) cop his first feel in Big had been MIA until Weeds. ”I’ve worked consistently for 20 years and I’ve been able to fly below the radar and make a terrific living for my kids,” mostly by playing charming, levelheaded, middle-of-the-road characters in such films as Miracle on 34th Street, 28 Days, and Finding Nemo — she voiced Coral, Nemo’s mom, who dies at the movie’s start. (Though there was 1994′s The Flintstones. But we’ll forgive that one.)

That’s why the Weeds role is such a departure for Perkins, who says Celia is ”one of the angriest people I’ve ever met.” The Aug. 29 episode gives her more cause for anger: Her character is confronted with a potentially life-altering crisis. ”There’s this clean human being on the outside, but on the inside there’s almost this rotten person, and it’s very much a metaphor for the suburbs she lives in,” she explains.

Not that Perkins hasn’t considered moving to the burbs. A Los Angeles resident, she has been married to cinematographer Julio Macat (Wedding Crashers) since 2000; Macat has three children from a previous marriage. ”I actually thought about it,” she says, incredulous at the notion.

”Every time we go out there, we’re like, We can do this, and then we’re there for a couple of hours, and it’s like, You have to get me out of here. I’d become an alcoholic.”

Even though she always returns to the city, that doesn’t mean she’ll ever go Hollywood. ”I’m gonna be 45 in November, and I’m not lying,” Perkins declares. ”And I’ve had no plastic surgery!” Now that’s an accomplishment.

 

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Bill: All right, welcome to “Politically Incorrect’s” Friday edition. Over here, Dane Cook. He’s got a lot to plug. He’s got a movie, “The Touch.” He’s got a TV show, “Crank Yankers.”

[ Laughter ]

On Comedy Central. And this is your record, “Harmful If Swallowed.” Okay.

[ Laughter ]

Pam Stenzel, you promote abstinence to teens through your organization, “Enlightened Communication,” my old job.

[ Laughter ]

Ron Livingston, I loved you in “Band Of Brothers.” You’re now on “The Practice,” Sundays at 10:00 on ABC. That’s where we are. Hey, good. And you’ll be with Vanessa Redgrave in “The Rumor Of Angels” in theaters February 1st. Welcome aboard, sir. And Elizabeth Perkins, one of my favorite guests back here.

Elizabeth: Thank you.

Bill: You have a Hallmark Hall Of Fame special, “My Sister’s Keeper,” this Sunday at 9:00 on CBS. Give a hand to our panel.

[ Cheers and applause ]

Let me just start off by saying that for the past four months, I have been asking the panelists who come here and our country itself a very important question, “Can we change?” And finally, someone has demonstrated that yes, they can, and that person is Britney Spears.

[ Laughter ]

Who all but admitted this week that she’s given up her seat on virgin and is now flying united.

[ Laughter ]

[ Applause ]

And I — save your boos to the end. And I just wanted to be the first to say, “Congratulations, Britney. Welcome aboard. Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”  [ Laughter and applause ]

Also, young lady, you shouldn’t think of this as a loss of your innocence so much as a chance to start dating outside of ‘Nsync.

[ Laughter ]

And it’s a good career move, too. A few more years with that virgin crap, and we’d be rummaging for your CDs in the Christian music bin.

[ Laughter ]

I said save your boos to the end. Yes, I think what we’ve learned here is that by not having intercourse, a girl can wind up with egg on her face.

[ Laughter ]

[ Applause ]

Because virginity, after all, is kind of like Enron stock. The longer you hold onto it, the less valuable it becomes. Plus, it’s dangerous. It was 72 virgins that motivated the hijackers, and virginity can cause health problems like irritability and an enlarged penis.

[ Laughter ]

Losing your virginity. I’m an optimist. I say you’re gaining popularity –

[ Laughter ]

– And a new hobby. So good for you for opening up Pandora’s Box –

[ Laughter ]

– And getting on the love train, so let’s give it up for giving it up. Huh, folks?

[ Cheers and applause ]

Now, Pam. I know this is just a coincidence. It is, that you were booked for this show just the week that Britney Spears — let’s take advantage of that coincidence and just let me ask the question. Isn’t it as much of a perversion to revolve your life around not getting laid as it would be the opposite?

Pam: Well, let me tell you why I was actually happy that she might have come out and said that, in fact, she’s not a virgin because most of us probably realized that in the beginning. And at the end of the day, I would much rather people be honest. Don’t say one thing and behave in another way. If you’re a virgin, behave that way and claim that and do that. If you’re not, say you’re not and be proud of it.

Bill: And you think she was acting too sexy?

Pam: Absolutely. She was saying one thing and then behaving in a manner –

Elizabeth: People who are provocative can’t be virgins?

Pam: Well, it’s not just about provocative. I mean, it was just every way that –

Bill: Yeah, I’ll say that.

Elizabeth: I think there’s a lot of provocative virgins out there.

Bill: Name –

[ Laughter ]

Go ahead. Who are they?

Elizabeth: I’m just saying that I don’t think that a woman has to act a certain way in order to protect her virginity or to protect her reputation. I don’t think she should walk around like a nun, or else people are gonna assume she’s not a virgin.

Ron: Now, this doesn’t mean that it’s over, though, because I’ve read about the whole thing where they’re doing secondary or born again virginity where you can start over fresh.

[ Laughter ]

Dane: How long is that?

Ron: I don’t know. I think you can do it every morning, I guess.

[ Laughter ]

Bill: You mean where –

Elizabeth: You see, I’m very pro-abstinence, though.

Bill: You are?

Elizabeth: Especially for teenagers, yeah.

Bill: Because?

Elizabeth: Because of AIDS, primarily.

Bill: Oh, come on.

Elizabeth: What do you mean, oh, come on?

Pam: AIDS is an important issue, but the other thing is is we have one in four of our teenagers infected with a sexually transmitted disease. Human papilloma virus kills more women every year –

Bill: Whoa. One in four of our teenagers?

Pam: One in four.

Dane: You looked so hot when you just said that.

[ Laughter ]

Ron: I think the dangerous thing is that it’s all very well and good to say that the way to get around that is to start preaching abstinence, but I think that’s sort of like saying if we get ‘em all to pledge not to crash the car, we can get rid of seat belts and air bags.

Pam: See, I think that when you teach abstinence, it’s gonna be a small percentage of teenagers who actually adopt that. I’m not saying that it’s gonna — everyone’s gonna adopt this philosophy. I mean, I think there has to be major –

Dane: When you preach anything, there’s always gonna be that large group of people who go, “No.”

Elizabeth: Exactly.

Pam: You tell 100 people the stove is hot, and 20 of ‘em are gonna go, “Really?”

Elizabeth: I think to be part of a program that also distributes condoms. It also teaches girls and boys about birth control.

Bill: What is the –

Elizabeth: I think it should be part of a program that involves everything.

Pam: Here’s the thing that I think that is misunderstood about abstinence education. I speak to half a million teenagers a year around the world. The way I start, and the way I would end is this. I did not come to your high school today to choose for you. You absolutely can do whatever you want. What I don’t want you to have to say at the end of the day is what I heard for nine years counseling teenage girls who found themselves pregnant is, “I didn’t know. If someone would have told me about all of these consequences of the choice I would have made, I would have made a different choice. I didn’t know.” You can do whatever you want, just don’t come back to me later and say you didn’t know, nobody told you.

Elizabeth: But when you talk to them about abstinence, you also talk to them about birth control?

Pam: With birth control comes certain risks. Birth control protects you from –

Elizabeth: Pregnancy.

Pam: Pregnancy. Birth control makes a young girl ten times more likely to contract a disease than if she were not taking that drug. Most likely, she may end up sterile or dead.

[ Talking over each other ]

Ron: That’s like saying that food gives you cancer and air is polluted.

[ Talking over each other ]

At some point, you’re gonna give up — unless you’re gonna go into a cloister, you’re gonna give up your virginity at some point.

Dane: But at that age, if you came into my school, and you were talking to me, half the time I’m just gonna be looking at you going, “God, her boobs are so big.”
[ Laughter ]

That’s what we’re thinking about at that age.

Lock and load.  [ Laughter ]

Bill: I think it is so anti-intellectual and so current in this culture whenever there’s a problem to have “Zero Tolerance,” “Just Say No.” In other words — like drugs. Just don’t deal with it at all, and of course, that is never an adult way to deal with anything.

Ron: I tell you one thing. I think if we see more girls swearing off sex, we’re gonna see a lot of guys swearing off flowers, jewelry and prom.

[ Laughter ]

Bill: Yes.

Pam: You know what I say to girls? Take the cash. I mean, if that’s all it’s worth, take the cash, my friend.

Bill: “Take the cash”? What are you talking about?

Pam: Well, if he’s saying, “I’m not gonna spend money on prom and flowers and all of that if she’s not gonna give it to me,” I just say take the cash at the end of the day.

Bill: That’s a whole other issue, which is that women should not think of their — as a –

[ Laughter ]

They should think of it as a form of pleasure, not a form of power. That’s their dilemma.

Elizabeth: Oh, but that goes both ways.

Bill: No, it doesn’t.

Elizabeth: Men can consider it power, either.

Dane: It’s better when it goes both ways.

Elizabeth: You have a much more powerful weapon than either one of us do.

Bill: You’ve gotta be kidding.

Elizabeth: Through history.

Bill: You gotta be kidding.

[ Talking over each other ]

Ron: There’s always been a little bit of negotiation that goes — you know, paradise by the dashboard lights. There’s a little bit of negotiation that goes on with first-time sex. And really, you know, when does it ever end, really?

Bill: And who is really always the one who is holding back? It’s not us. How many times have you guys ever said, “I’m not ready”?

[ Laughter ]
When have we ever not been ready? So a woman has to decide, is that power or is that pleasure? I could use it for power because I can say, “No, you’re not getting it until you come across with whatever I want.” That’s power. We don’t have that power. This is a source of weakness for us.

[ Laughter ]

I gotta take a commercial. We’ll be back.

[ Applause ]

Bill: All right. I wanna talk about this President Bush television special that was on the other night. Did you see it? Any? How many in the audience saw “The Real West Wing”?
[ Scattered applause ]

For this audience, that’s good.

[ Light laughter ]

That means a lot of them saw it, because this was probably a big ratings winner. I’m sure that’s why NBC did it. I don’t know why else they would because I thought it was a travesty. I thought it was ridiculous that they would do this kiss-ass, suck-up piece with The President of The United States. The Republican Convention does not show a more flattering video of the president.

Ron: A lot of softballs in it. It was definitely pretty puffy.

Bill: Tom Brokaw just sat there with the president, and they showed him, of course, going through his day, working out.

Elizabeth: This has been going on for many, many, many administrations. Don’t you remember that stuff with JFK and Jackie on the beach with the dogs and the frisbees and the children running around?

Bill: That was way after he was dead.

[ Light laughter ]

Elizabeth: And they’re still showing the Kennedys.

Bill: He’s not running the country’s now. It’s not the press’s job to interrogate the Kennedys. They’re not in power. It’s the job of the media, is it not, to be objective, rather than –

Ron: I think there’s a trend going to where the government is seeing, “You know, the way to get the media, the way to control the media is to control the media’s access. If we offer ‘em something that they’ve never had before, the inside of the West Wing,” which is something that I think is kind of interesting. It’s interesting to see how the government is gonna work, but it does seem that NBC is fairly powerless in how they report that.

Bill: You’re right. It is a corrupt deal. It’s like, “We will give you this television special,” because, after all, he is the biggest star in the world right now. He’s got an 80% approval rating. That’s hot in TV. Okay? “If we give you this access, you’re gonna be nice to us. You’re gonna make us look good.” I mean, I think that is just such a punt on the part of the press.

Dane: He’s trying to keep that approval rating high, too. He’s gotta do a follow-up. You know what I mean? It’s like at this point, he should team up with Julia Roberts and put out a smash hit. This guy is, you know –

Elizabeth: Well, he’s sort of failed in the intellectual arena, so maybe they just decided they’re gonna drop the good, ole home boy Texan thing instead, and this is a really good way to sell that.

Bill: That’s another thing. They talk about the way he’s plain-spoken. They had a whole segment about that.

Elizabeth: No, he’s just illiterate.

[ Laughter and applause ]

Dane: I think, too, it just makes people feel comfortable. I mean, really to cut it right down to it. It’s like he makes you feel like things are gonna be okay. It really does instill that in people.

Elizabeth: See, he scares me to death.

Bill: Really?

Elizabeth: I don’t feel okay at all.

Dane: I think most people feel that way.

Elizabeth: I don’t feel okay at all.

Pam: At the end of the day, it was a little bit of self-promotion. I mean, I thought, because I didn’t see the whole thing the first night, but I saw pieces going into it, and it seemed like all they were doing was promoting “The West Wing” by pretending to have this reality thing in the White House. And anybody who believes that that was reality when there were cameras there is out of their mind. That was staged from the beginning to the end. No one’s gonna behave the way they would normally behave with the camera in there.

Ron: You can’t really fault the bush administration for that because, of course, what else are they gonna do if you hand them this thing on a silver platter.

[ Talking over each other ]

Elizabeth: — selling the presidency.

Bill: There’s a lot of vanity. Maureen Dowd’s column the other day pointed this out. There is a lot of — the whole administration was on the cover of “Vanity Fair.”

Elizabeth: That’s right. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen that happen. I don’t ever remember seeing that happen.

Bill: I think it’s very unseemly for a sitting President to do that, and I don’t know if we should be congratulating ourselves. I mean, she said it best. She said, “I hesitate to interrupt the victory laps, but something in me really wants to know. Is the war over? Did we win it already, or not?” And she says, “Maybe we should stop the premature congratulations and the Patton-like preening and try to finish the job.” On the one hand, they keep telling us we should stay vigilant, and the war isn’t over. But it doesn’t look that way.

Elizabeth: I think this administration has absolutely no idea how to handle this. I think they are so far in over their heads. They have no idea whether or not this is something that they wanna continue doing, or whether they should tell the American people to just get on with their lives. “But oh, be prepared, and oh, you don’t have to worry about flying, but now we have three hours of security before you get there.” I don’t think they have any idea.

[ Talking over each other ]

Elizabeth: They don’t know how to handle it. I’m not sure any administration would, though.

Ron: I think it’s their job to try and handle it. They gotta make it up as they go along. It’s just the same way that every administration has dealt with every crisis that’s ever happened. You know, and as far as the TV show thing, what’s interesting about it is that they somehow feel that they can gain credibility by saying, “Our real-life administration is every bit just like the television show that you guys all know and love.”

Bill: Yeah.

Dane: And it feels like they’ve got these writers from “Armageddon” writing these lines. He’s got the most amazing sound bites. The one with Iraq just recently. He said, “We’re gonna deal with them diplomatically — for now.” And it was, like, you felt that pause, and you’re like, “Who is writing this, man?!”

[ Laughter ]

This is brilliant stuff.

Elizabeth: “We’re gonna get these guys that knocked this building down.”

Dane: And the people were, like, “Yeah!”

Elizabeth: Who talks like that?

Bill: What’s wrong with that?

Elizabeth: Knock this building down?

Dane: “We hear you, and right now, the American people hear you” –

Bill: They didn’t knock the building down?

[ Laughter ]

Elizabeth: They flew jets and then destroyed them. They didn’t just knock ‘em down.

[ Talking over each other ]

Dane: He should start every speech by kicking in a door and walking out.

[ Laughter and applause ]

“What’s up? We’re gonna kick ass tonight. 8:00, 10:00 central.”

Bill: We’ll be back.

[ Cheers and applause ]

Bill: All righty. We were talking about prepackaged entertainment of the touchy-feely variety. Has anyone been watching the flame? The Olympic flame — and of course, by that I mean Greg Louganis.

[ Light laughter ]

I kid, of course. As it comes here to Salt Lake City. When do the Olympics start? In a couple of weeks or something like that? Okay. So it makes that journey — I mean, every time I watch a news report with the Olympic flame, it is somebody carrying the flame who literally can’t carry it.

[ Laughter ]

Right? I’m all for evening it out for the disabled and making it so that we should make it up to them for being dealt such a severe blow by life, and I just think you can go a little bit too far with this where it looks like we can only celebrate the infirm, and what about the regular person who gets dinner on the table?

Elizabeth: I think they just wanna sell tickets to the Olympics. They just want people to tune in. ‘Cause it tugs at people’s heart strings. It gets them to see how supportive we are. We let these people carry the torch. It’s the spirit of the Olympics, and I think it’s the first time I’ve seen the Olympics have to advertise this heavily. I’ve never seen it this heavily advertised ever. Maybe if there had been astronauts with disabilities, NASA wouldn’t have lost all of its charm.

[ Light laughter ]

Ron: There’s something like, 11,000 people who carry the flame, and it’s not just people. I saw something where, like, Chrysler dealerships are driving down the street with the flame out the windows.

Dane: There’s a dog with the flame in its mouth now running.

Bill: Yeah, but it just seems an inordinate amount. I mean, this is just a partial list. Somebody — a bacterial infection sufferer in a wheelchair, quadruple amputee, deaf. A homeless alcoholic whose children were taken away from her.

[ Laughter ]

Elizabeth: It’s all for ratings. It’s ratings, ratings, ratings, ratings. Whatever they can do to suck people in to watch the shows, they’ll do it. How many September 11th stories have you seen? It just goes on and on and on and on. It’s just to get people to tune in and watch their stations. think it’s incredibly manipulative.

Ron: That thing’s been going on for thousands of years. I think it’s tough to scrape up people who still wanna carry the damn thing.

Elizabeth: Yeah, exactly.

[ Light laughter ]

Bill: No, that’s not true.

Ron: I mean, did you sign up to do it? I didn’t want to do it.

Dane: I wanted to do it, but I actually have an abnormally large ball sack.

[ Laughter ]

That’s my thing. Yes, you do.

[ Laughter ]

Bill: Then people could wallow in their pity for you.

[ Laughter ]

We’ll take a commercial. We’ll be back once more.

[ Applause ]

Bill: I was only polite. No. No, no. We’re not gonna talk about his disability. We’re talking about the Olympics and whether the Olympics — celebrate disability when we all know what the Olympics celebrate is more homosexuality because let’s face it, the Olympics are gay. Am I right?

Elizabeth: No, they’re not gay.

Bill: People know what I — the Olympics are very gay.

Elizabeth: Why do you say that? What’s gay about the Olympics?

Bill: Synchronized swimming.

[ Light laughter ]

Ron: With the possible exception of the biathlon.

[ Laughter ]

Dane: The javelin swallow.

Elizabeth: Major league football is very gay.

Bill: Major league football?

Elizabeth: Yeah.

[ Laughter ]

Bill: Chicks. Chicks.

[ Laughter ]

Yeah. ‘Cause every time they score a run in football –

[ Laughter ]

They pat each other on — yeah, it looks gay.

Elizabeth: In little tight pants. The locker room with just the shoulder pads and nothing else.

Bill: Yeah, but anyone’s who’s ever stayed at the Olympic village will tell you. It’s gay. Look at that opening thing. It’s like Cirque Du Soleil. I mean, look. When they open the Olympics, you’ll see. It’s artistic, to say the least.

[ Applause ]

Episode aired on Friday, January 25, 2001

 

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To celebrate the return of Weeds (Mondays at 10 pm/ET, Showtime), we sat down with  Mary-Louise Parker and Elizabeth Perkins to discuss getting naked, kissing Albert Brooks and what to expect in the  trippy new season.

TV Guide: What are Mary-Louise and Elizabeth like versus your ever-battling characters, pot-dealing Nancy and her frenemy, Celia?
Mary-Louise Parker: Well, unlike our characters, I want time with Elizabeth. I don’t know what the similarities between Celia and Nancy are, though — well, except they’re both very particular about their footwear.
Elizabeth Perkins: Yeah, I don’t know how to be Celia without high heels on. So, yes, we both have shoes in common in our very in-depth approach to our characters. [Laughs] We’d love to do more together. We’re very similar in our work.

TV Guide: How so?
Perkins: We’re pretty laidback. There’s no drama.

TV Guide: Is it true that the cast teases Mary-Louise over the fact that she’s never smoked pot?
Perkins: Totally! We can’t believe it. She’s the pot mom who’s never smoked pot? It’s an innocuous drug, and how many people are truly marijuana addicts?
Parker: Well, I know a couple of ‘em. But, generally, people don’t get up on steeples with rifles when they’re on pot — they just don’t do their taxes for a year. [Laughs]

TV Guide: Mary-Louise, do you have any outrageous vices?
Parker: I was fairly guileless when I was younger, but when you have two young kids, you have to redirect the monorail. So I’m pretty square.

TV Guide: On the other hand, Elizabeth, you posed nude for Allure in 2006 and…
Parker: Dude, I’m naked every time I turn around on the show! I’m, like, “Hey, when do I get to wear clothes?” But I don’t think of nudity as being outrageous.
Perkins: Me neither.

TV Guide: That’s good, because there’s lots of very creative, um, coupling on Weeds, isn’t there?
Parker: I gotta take a little credit for some of that, ’cause I like to block the sex myself —
Perkins: — because you always want to do something that’s completely not where the music whooshes and the lights dim and you’re suddenly in the missionary position. Boring!

TV Guide: Got it. So what’s new on the show this year?
Parker: Silas [Nancy's teenage son, played by Hunter Parrish] gets it on with an older woman [played by Julie Bowen].
Perkins: And Albert Brooks is on the show [as Nancy's father-in-law].
Parker: He’s fantastic. I have a little crush on Albert. I mean, I don’t want to knock him to the ground and put my tongue in his mouth, but I do have a little G-rated crush.

TV Guide: Well, it won’t be Weeds unless somebody puts their tongue down his throat, right?
Perkins: [Laughs] I would hope Celia does at some point soon.

TV Guide: Is there anything as actresses you’d refuse to do?
Perkins: Anything X-rated. Sometimes I don’t know how the women on
The L Word do what they do.

TV Guide: Will Nancy get deeper into the drug trade? Like, she’d never deal hard stuff, would she?
Parker: I don’t know…. It’s possible.
Perkins: Well, Celia discovers drugs this year. [She's living on the border], and she’s like a kid in a candy shop. Poor thing, she needs a new addiction — booze just wasn’t enough.

TV Guide: Exactly why is bad behavior so fun to watch?
Parker: ‘Cause people are so repressed. And, also, there’s just something delicious about watching people misbehave without any sense of conscience. I loved Absolutely Fabulous because of that. Hey, Elizabeth, I’d like to remake that with you!
Perkins: I watch it every time they rerun it.
Parker: OK, that’s what we’ll do after Weeds. [Laughs] God, we’d be fabulous!

 

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Elizabeth Perkins reports her character’s antagonistic relationship with Nancy Botwin, the pot-selling mom played by Mary Louise Parker on “Weeds” “is going to change” as the just-launched new season of the Showtime series unfurls.  “I love it when we’re at odds, because it’s so much fun to play,” says Perkins, who’s garnered two Golden Globe and Emmy nods for her portrayal of Celia Hodes on the show.

“But we’re finally going to be in cahoots with each other.” She notes, “There were so many seasons of us being at odds, there was no place to go except for us to accept it’s fate we’re to be together. It’s kind of like having a sister you can’t stand and she’s not going to go away. From the moment last season when Nancy had to come to Celia and say, ‘Look, I need your house,’ Celia has had the upper hand. It’s sort of like Celia is family now whether you want her to be or not. She’s not going away, and Nancy has to figure out a way to work with her.”

***

Perkins adds, “I love it because I think Celia is really madly in love with Nancy. I think that’s a facet of the relationship that will always be there. Celia’s just kind of like this puppy following Nancy around saying, ‘Why won’t you love me?’ I don’t think that will ever change. I think it comes out of the general boredom with her own life.

She gets really excited with this (marijuana) stuff. I loved that moment last season when she’s with Conrad, and he calls her ‘Gangster Barbie.’ I’m so excited to be part of the gang now.”

 

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August 21, 2006 – The redheaded Elizabeth Perkins can turn into the shrill blond personification of mean on ‘Weeds’ when the camera starts to roll. As Celia Hodes, the maniacally self-involved, acid-tongued social-climbing cancer survivor on “Weeds,” Elizabeth Perkins has brought to life the most deliciously vile character since the puppy-skinning Cruella De Vil.

As the actress put it: “I would eat my own young.”

“Weeds,” about widowed soccer mom Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) who takes to selling pot to maintain her cushy lifestyle after her husband’s death, is a wildly funny comment on the utter selfishness of a society whose religion is self-indulgence. And Perkins’ character – neighbor to pot-peddling Nancy – is the high priestess of narcissism.

“She is just machete-ing her way through life,” says Perkins.

“She finds herself standing on the end of a gangplank and saying, ‘Where is everybody?’ And then she just wanders back onto the boat.” Like all textbook egotists, she’s completely unaware of the effect she has on others. When her husband loses his job she says: “How could you do this to me?”

And she has nicknamed her plump preteen daughter Isabelle (played by Allie Grant), “Isabelly.”

“There are times when it really crosses the line,” admits Perkins.

This season on “Weeds” (Monday nights at 10 on Showtime), Isabelle is discovered by a modeling agent for a husky kids clothing line. Of course, what’s empowering to Isabelle is utterly mortifying to her mother.

At Isabelle’s audition, Celia chaffs at having to rub dimpled elbows with the plus-size hoi polloi. When one cheery mom offers her a “maple bar,” Celia declines.

“No, thank you,” she says. “I’m getting a corn syrup contact high just sitting here.”

When Isabelle gets the job, Celia dubs her “the face of America’s trans fat.”)

Perkins has discussed her character’s cruelty with 13-year-old Grant.

“I didn’t want it to be this thing where she’s going home: ‘Am I fat?’ I tell her, even if you were anorexic, you would be too fat for Celia because it’s Celia’s problem and Celia is working out her own low self-esteem on her daughter.

“It’s Celia’s obsession with having the perfect child. And she’s not that child. Paris Hilton is that child,” she says. “And she got that.”

Perkins has a daughter, 14, and three stepsons – 13-year-old twins and a 17-year-old. And while she thinks anyone under 16 should not be watching “Weeds,” she didn’t forbid her children to watch it.

“It wasn’t until about three-quarters of the way through the first season that they were coming home from school and saying, ‘So what’s this about your show? Somebody at school said you had sex with a black man in the back seat of a car?’” says Perkins, referring to last season’s tryst with Nancy’s drug-dealing partner Conrad (Romany Malco).

“At first they were kind of appalled,” she says, “Now they say, ‘Mom, you’re on a really good show.’”

Perkins thinks so, too.

“I’m having a ball,” she says. “It’s a gas to play someone so flawed. I’m so lucky to be on this show. It comes around so rarely – particularly for a woman my age.”

Perkins, 45, is nominated for a supporting actress Emmy, the only “Weeds” cast member to get a nod. It is perhaps a testament to her ability to bring a sense of humanity to someone so overtly nasty.

“I think she brings another *layer to it,” says Parker. “It’s because she’s such a wonderful actress that she’s able to bring that kind of *dimension to the character. She’s constantly trying to make Celia a human being.”

Albeit a very damaged one.

“There are brief interludes, but we definitely don’t linger on Celia’s humanity very long,” says Perkins.

“That’s what’s so much fun. [*Celia] is completely, unapologetically, politically incorrect. It can be kind of boring to play someone who’s heroically always learning her lesson. Celia learns nothing,” says Perkins. “For an actress there’s nothing better than to play someone that is so completely balls out.”

 

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Make Hollywood Today your Emmy Partner; Visit all week and during the Emmy Cast for updates by the minute.

This Sunday, actress Elizabeth Perkins will walk the red carpet as a nominee for the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards. And boy is she excited.

It took her a long time to cultivate the Emmy noms. “I’ve been doing this for almost 25 years now,” said Perkins. “And I think this (nomination) is partly more of longevity.”

“Weeds,” the dark comedy about a pot farmer, has now received 10 nominations five for each of the two years it’s been on air. Perkins received her second nomination for best supporting actress for her role as the town Mayor in the cable show. However, she thinks that the nomination is not for her recent work but more of an overarching congratulatory effort for her career.

“It’s the respect of your peers and your industry that you have been hanging in there as long as you can,” the actress told Hollywood Today.

Perkins, also known for her film work (”Big,” “Cats and Dogs”) shared her favorite thing about this 59-year-old television award celebration.

“The best thing about going to Emmy’s is that it’s a chance for me to see people that I have known for 20 years but don’t usually get to see,” said Perkins. “I can run into Tony Shaloub, Hugh Laurie, Amy Brennamen, people I’ve known for so long but never get to see.”

Perkins admits that she runs into more than just long-time-no-see friends. Just last year the actress ran straight to the bathroom and undressed just to wipe the sweat off her body.

“I would have slipped on the carpet because of my sweat,” Perkins said. “It was 108 degrees on the red carpet.”

“Weeds” is a series about a suburban mother who becomes a pot farmer after her husband dies and she is left in a desperate bind to care for her 10-year-old son.

The show first debuted in 2005, at which time cast and crew expected media to raise controversy about the show because of its cannabis content.

This year’s season of “Weeds” is expected to be more brow-raising than the last.

“This year we’re going pretty far,” Perkins said. “It’s pretty out there. The finale this year was shocking to even us (cast).” “For cable television it’s about finding that medium between films and prime time television,” Perkins continues, “you can do much more cutting edge material you can go a lot more with scripts, writing, nudity.”

We look forward to seeing Perkins at this Sunday’s Emmys but hopefully the red carpet temperature is cooler than last year.

 

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August 13, 2006 – If You Thought Gabrielle From Desperate Housewives Was Shallow, Wait Till You Meet Weeds’ Celia Hodes, Writes Maggie Wicks.

Neuroses in suburbia is what good TV is made of these days. Polygamous Mormons and institutionalised housewives have taken their places in our hearts and our viewing habits. And now, in the middle-class Californian suburb of Agrestic, housewife Nancy Botwin is selling pot to fund her lifestyle. Having recently lost her husband to a mid-jog heart attack, Nancy has no choice but to start dealing drugs to her local community.

Not quite a comedy and not quite a drama, Weeds is dark and hilarious, and what might be called “lowered reality”. There’s the sweet drug-dealing mom who’s trying to keep weed out of schools, the sexually active teenagers who can’t find anywhere to lose their virginities and the husband who’s banging the tennis coach. And Elizabeth Perkins – remember her from the now cult Tom Hanks movie Big – has the best role of all: dissatisfied, appearance-obsessed Celia Hodes.

“Celia is damaged,” says Perkins. “She thinks she’s never really lived the life she feels she deserves. She’s the most politically incorrect person in town and at home she is a nightmare. Her husband is screwing the tennis pro and she can’t divorce him because that would mean giving up her lifestyle. Her daughter is fat and she can’t see beyond that. It is a pleasure to play someone so unheroic.” Have the two got anything in common? “Absolutely not,” she declares. “That’s not even my real hair on the show. This is a chance for me to step out of Elizabeth Perkins and take on a totally different human being.”

Celia certainly gives Perkins the most contentious lines in the show. In the first episode Celia’s daughter films her father having sex with the tennis coach, and tricks Celia into watching it. “You little c–-,” Celia spits at the screen. “I knew I should have had an abortion.”

Perkins says she approached the producers several times questioning whether her character is going too far, but this wasn’t one of them. “When I read the pilot and read that line I knew I had to play this role. If I could play that line and pull it off I thought, ‘We’re gonna have a great time on this show’.”

Perkins was never a struggling young actor – her first movie audition landed her the part that was her making – the role of Tom Hanks’ rather bewildered girlfriend in the 1988 film Big. But she never reached any great heights either – her biggest box-office success was playing Wilma in the awful Flintstones movie in 1994. On the subject of Big – in which she jumped on a trampoline in a stunning 80s mesh skirt and famously revealed her boobs to Tom Hanks’ 12-year-old character – Perkins is keen to move on quickly.

“Everyone knows that film as, ‘Oh, that great film that Tom Hanks did’, so I’ll always be proud of that. I was fortunate enough at 24 to get my first movie audition and get the part and my name was above the title. I was born under a lucky star. But I’m more grateful that at this point in my life I’m 45, I’m still working and I’ve been given a great role. I’m extremely grateful to be going to work every day, I haven’t felt that way for years.”

She especially wasn’t feeling that way when she visited Auckland in the late 1990s to play the part of evil queen Alcmene in what Perkins describes as “a terrible TV mini series”. The show was Hercules.

“We were based in Auckland for about four months and it poured all the time we were there. It was grim and cold and we thought we were making something really serious – they told us we were making something great. Oh god, I can’t even talk about it.”

Thankfully things are looking up. Weeds has had plenty of fun shocking middle America, satirising the mundanity of living in suburbia and taking open pot shots at what Americans love most – beauty, SUVs and George Bush.

It has been a hit. “We thought it would be big in Europe and Australia and New Zealand,” says Perkins.

“We didn’t expect the American public to get it. It’s really touching on social issues in a really unapologetic way -issues that just aren’t discussed in our country. There aren’t many references in mainstream shows that say George Bush is an asshole.”

Perkins says despite her Democrat leanings, she was shocked by the show’s content.

“Pretty much on a daily basis I’d go to (creator and producer) Jenji Cohen and say, `I’m really uncomfortable with this’. And she’d say, `think back to Archie Bunker in All in the Family – he was a full blown bigot, racist and sexist. He said `spic’ and `tar baby’. We’re putting Celia out there in all her ugliness so she can be examined. It doesn’t condone it – we’re just putting it out there.”

But it isn’t the pot smoking that is suburbia’s dirty little secret – it’s every other thing in the show.

“There are fat camps all over America and every actress in Hollywood is anorexic,” says Perkins. “We’re fighting this dirty war overseas so housewives can drive their (Cadillac SUV) Escalades. And we’re putting out the largest emissions in the world. Marijuana is innocuous – it’s really neither here nor there. The problem is that we, as Americans, will not give up our lifestyles. Marijuana is just a metaphor for the dirty little secrets underneath this pristine American way of life.”

 

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August 27, 2008 – FOR ANY other self-described homebody with four teenage kids, posing nude in a magazine and playing an outrageous character on one of TV’s most provocative series would be unusual. But 46-year-old Elizabeth Perkins isn’t your typical mom.

Two years ago, she originated the co-starring role of abrasive neighbour Celia Hodes on Showtime’s satirical dramedy “Weeds.” Celia is a bitter, sharp-tongued drinker who is openly contemptuous of her husband and children – and Perkins makes her funny. But for the actress in real life, family is her top priority. On screen she has most often played the good girlfriend – opposite Tom Hanks in the comedy fantasy “Big” – or the good wife and mother – Wilma in “The Flintstones” film.

But bad-girl Celia is “pretty much the best role I’ve ever had,” says the vacationing Perkins by phone from Massachusetts.

“Celia is completely unapologetic. There’s no limit to how far she’ll go with anything she says or does. At the same time, she’s tied up and stifled.”

Kicking off its third season on August 13, “Weeds” depicts a fictional California suburb where a suddenly widowed, stay-at-home mom, Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), has resorted to selling pot to survive financially.

But no longer merely dabbling in weed, Nancy this year fully embraces the drug dealer she has become. Perkins’ Celia is her so-called best friend who, as a righteous PTA head, has posted drug-free-zone security cameras around town.

“I usually play the person who learns something in the third act and changes their life around,” says Perkins. “But I don’t see that happening at all with Celia. Things tend to get worse for her.” Previously, Celia was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. This year she is teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown and descending further into alcoholism.

This season, she will fight an ugly divorce battle following a steamy extramarital affair with Doug (Kevin Nealon), an also wed, pot-smoking accountant.

“Celia routinely blames other people for the twists and turns her life has taken,” Perkins says. “She’s a very irresponsible person masquerading as super-responsible. She says, ‘It’s everybody else’s fault that I drink. I drink because I have this crappy life.”

Perkins first drew attention nearly 20 years ago with her role in the blockbuster “Big.” But she made her theatrical debut in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” in 1986, appearing the same year in her first film, “About Last Night.” More recently, she co-starred in lesser features like “Must Love Dogs” and “Jiminy Glick in Lalawood,” along with doing voice work for the hit animated film “Finding Nemo.” Her next release is “Fierce People,” starring Diane Lane, due out September 7.

“Big” put Perkins on Hollywood’s radar screen. But the way she tells it, the actress failed to capitalise on that opportunity when, instead of pulling out all stops in pursuing her career, she had a child.

“If I had devoted more time to my career, I probably could have been a lot more successful. But that was never my intention. I’m very much a homebody and identify myself as a wife and mother far above identifying myself as an actor,” says Perkins, who lives in Los Angeles’ suburban San Fernando Valley.

Her 15-year-old daughter, and three teenage stepsons complete her family with cinematographer Julio Macat, whom she married in 2000. “I love to cook gigantic seafood dishes and huge English-style Sunday dinners with roasts and Yorkshire pudding,” she says.

Her life slowed down two years ago, though, when she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, and she now depends on insulin injections. “It’s very rare to get Type 1 in middle age. We haven’t gotten to the bottom of what brought it on,” says the actress, who must test her blood-sugar level about six times daily and be vigilant about what she eats. Candy and alcohol – and, she says, marijuana – are not on her to-do list. These days on set, she takes it easy too.

“If I’m in the middle of shooting and get a low-blood-sugar attack, it’s a disaster. I’ve had to stop and say, ‘I need to sit down for a minute.”‘

Otherwise, Perkins is the picture of health, and to prove it, last year she posed in the buff for “Allure” magazine. “I said, ‘Wow, nobody ever asked me to do that before.’ I thought, ‘This may be the only time you ever have the chance to take off your clothes and let somebody take your picture.’

Perkins was born in Queens, New York, but grew up on her grandfather’s farm on the border of Vermont and Massachusetts. A teenage loner, she “traveled with the wrong pack of kids. I could have gone down a very unproductive path,” she says. Instead, she immersed herself in acting after wandering into a theater on a local fairground. “I saw the actors up on the stage and said to myself, ‘These are my people.’ I felt like I was home.”

 

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Elizabeth Perkins talks about what it’s like to work on “Weeds,” possibly the most drug-addled show on TV.

The Emmy-, Golden Globe- and SAG-nominated actress tells Fancast: Inside TV the truth about smoking “stunt weed,” why she thinks marijuana should be legalized and why she loved spiking her daughter’s food with laxatives, shaving her husband’s head, and taking Quaaludes to PTA meetings.

On the show, people! On the show! Here’s an excerpt:

Snoop Dogg, who guested on the show, said you guys use “stunt weed”; what is stunt weed?

EP: “If we smoked real weed, we wouldn’t get anything done over here. Stunt weed is sort of what you would smoke if you went out and bought rose-flavored cigarettes, or cinnamon cigarettes or clove. It is a combination of herbs that don’t get you stoned. Although if you shoot all day with it you do get sort of lightheaded.”

Does it smell authentic?

EP: “Oh, yeah, it actually smells like marijuana, which is kind of fun. Which kind of it sets up the whole feeling around here that we’re all stoned. Although we really are not stoned.”

What are your views on the whole pot thing?

EP: “I think it is crazy that it is illegal, and I think it is crazy that people are in jail once they get busted with small amounts of marijuana. I am so pro-legalized marijuana because I just don’t see it as that dangerous of a narcotic. I don’t think that means high school students should be able to do bong hits whenever they want to. I do think (adults) should be able to do what they want in the privacy of their own home with an herb that grows in the backyard.”

You’ve said Celia Rhodes is certifiably insane. What are the key moments where you went “How am I going to play this?”

EP: “Putting laxatives in your daughter’s food. Walking into the PTA meeting with Quaaludes in your pocket, uhm, becoming so shit-faced you fall asleep on the atrium of your floor. Shaving your husband’s head, pulling your best friend’s hair. Celia says the most outrageous things. She is the racist, bigot, white woman who is clearly unaware of the effect she is having on other people. She is jealous, envious, greedy, mean — she is a certifiable insane witch. I love playing her.”

And we love watching her.

 

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Playing a not-so-likable character on television does have its perks, and for Emmy-nominated actress Elizabeth Perkins, best known as manipulative soccer mom and PTA member Celia Hodes on Weeds, it is getting the opportunity to unleash one’s own “bad” side on a regular basis.

“It’s so much fun for me to let out all my inner demons on someone like Celia,” Perkins told the New York Daily News.  “She’s a horror show.  She wins the prize for worst mother of the year.  I kind of based her on moms I’ve seen on the soccer field and moms I’ve met whose children I’ve worked with.  They are sort of living out their dead dreams on their child – everything they didn’t have or everything they never became.”

Perkins, however, is a far cry from her on-screen persona.  She has four children with second husband, Argentinian cinematographer Juliot Macat, and meeting with teachers and raising funds for her children’s school is part of her routine.  However, her convincing portrayal of Celia, who also serves as the confidante of marijuana-dealer Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), has not only earned her two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, but has sometimes led the Weeds cast and crew to believe that she is Celia.

Perkins, 46, has been part of the entertainment industry for more than 20 years.  She first gained attention for her work on the romantic comedy, About Last Night, and now, apart from starring on Weeds, is appearing in a new coming-of-age film, Fierce People.  In the film, Perkins plays Mrs. Langley, the daughter of a wealthy despot.

“It’s a smaller role than I would normally have taken, but I loved the material so much,” Elizabeth Perkins told the New York Daily News.  “I loved the idea of playing this ghost who kind of drifts around the background.  She has been in that box so long – which is why she stays drunk – that she’s almost become a goldfish in a bowl.  If you picked her up and took her out of the bowl and plopped her on the counter, she would just flounder and die.”

Despite her long and successful career, Elizabeth Perkins has managed to maintain a sense of normalcy in her life.

“I’m on a really interesting show, but I can still go shopping at my local Ralph’s and I still make a great living, and I work all the time,” she said.  “I feel like I have one of the best jobs in the world.”

 

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November 28, 2006 – WEEDS might be about suburban mums in a supposedly pristine American neighbourhood, but don’t make the mistake of dismissing it as a lazily conceived Desperate Housewives clone.

For a start, actor Elizabeth Perkins explains, Weeds has a dark, subversive streak the cast of Housewives can only dream about. Perkins, who rose to prominence in saccharine movies The Flintstones and Big, describes Weeds as the most confronting TV concept she’s seen.

Playing mixed-up mum Celia, she adds, gave her the chance to flex some serious acting muscle.

“It can be bold-faced and crass,” Perkins says of Weeds. “It can seem to be satirical, racist and bigoted, but once you start examining what it’s saying about American society and it’s underbelly, it all makes sense.”

Mary-Louise Parker plays widow Nancy Botwin, who’s been left alone to raise two boys. With no means of support for her children, Nancy decides to maintain their lifestyle by becoming a pot dealer in her neighbourhood.

Her suppliers are members of a family in a shady LA neighborhood.

Nancy’s friends include Celia (Perkins), a miserable woman with a husband who sleeps with his tennis coach. Celia also has a teenage daughter who sleeps with Nancy’s son; and a chubby daughter whose chocolate stash Celia laces with laxatives.

“People ask me if we are making a show that promotes the use or sale of marijuana and I say absolutely not,” Perkins says. “Our show has been likened to the war in Iraq in terms of what people are prepared to do to protect their own best interests. “Weeds is saying, here’s this pristine neighbourhood, the so-called American dream. Then it’s showing you that beneath that dream is the nasty s— that keeps the community running.”

A line of dialogue in the first Weeds episode convinced Perkins she should accept the role of Celia.

Discovering her daughter has been intimate with Nancy’s son, an angry Celia mumbles,

“the little *&$#, I wish I’d had an abortion”.”I read that and thought, ‘right, where do I sign on for this show . . . someone has finally tailor-made a role for me,”

Perkins laughs.

“Seriously, though, there are often times I wander down to the creator’s office and find myself saying, ‘Oh God, how am I going to play this (scene)?’ “The abortion line is typical of this. It’s a great line, but as a performer getting out there and saying it, it’s confronting a very controversial subject. “Celia is a racist and bigot. The creators have had to say to me, ‘You are not this person (Celia), so you need to de-evolve to play her’. Celia runs rough-shod and has no idea what she’s saying or the effect she has on people.”

But Perkins has never been restrained when talking about her own career.

Born in Queens, New York, and raised in Vermont, Perkins studied acting at Chicago’s Goodman School of Drama at the DePaul University. Her first film role was in Sexual Perversity. She then shone as the grown woman interested in Tom Hanks in Big.

Perkins’ career has been inconsistent. Many in Hollywood feel she has never gained the traction to bring her the stardom which seemed to be within her grasp.

Perhaps this can be attributed to her struggle to deal with the impact a high profile brings.

Asked if she’s ever been someone who stressed about what the showbiz industry thought of her, Perkins says, “I don’t give a s— about that stuff. You’ll never see me at the opening of something unless I’m in it. I won’t go to an awards ceremony unless I’m nominated. I find the spotlight the most painful part of life in Hollywood. I’m not remotely interested in fame.”

For Weeds, Perkins says she had to pull back her own moral beliefs. “As an actor, I feel like accepting the role was like standing at the edge of a pool. You pinch your nose and just plunge into the water,” she says.

“We stereotype everyone on the show – Jews, Christians, blacks, whites, Hispanics.”This show is a dream for any actor. Celia’s one of the great characters any actor of my age (46) will ever get the chance to play. I’m completely out of my mind with happiness.”

 

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Elizabeth Perkins really loves playing the controlling, manipulative and image-obsessed Celia Hodes on the Showtime hit “Weeds.”

But that doesn’t mean she likes Celia, the PTA president who cheats on her husband, doesn’t like her daughter and failed to get much sympathy even when she battled breast cancer.

“I think she’s a complete horror show, she’s completely out of her mind but in a really great way for an actress anyway,” Perkins said this week. “But I think there are parts of her that ring very true.”

“Weeds” has provided her with a welcome return to those early comic roles.

“I don’t think people think of me as doing comedy and yet I’ve done so much comedy so it’s nice to be able to remind people every week that I can be funny … and that I will do full-frontal nudity on television.”

 

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From playing Tom Hanks’ love interest in Big to Wilma Flinstone in The Flintstones, Elizabeth Perkins has been around the world of Hollywood. She’s playing the very protective sister of Diane Lane in her new movie Must Love Dogs.
The film brings together some of Elizabeth’s best friends in the industry from Diane, Dermot Mulroney, Stockard Channing, and Christopher Plummer.

In the film, she decides to put Diane’s profile on an internet dating site to help her find a man. But would Elizabeth do that in real life? Read our interview to find out:

Do you own a dog?

Elizabeth Perkins: Yes, I own two dogs – Buster and Lulu, they’re both rescue pups. Buster is a Boston terrier Chihuahua and Lulu is a miniature Rhodesian Ridgeback cause she has a ridge, she howls, yet she only weighs seven pounds. Yes, I have two cats, four fish, and we used to have a mouse named Fluffball, but he just died a couple weeks ago. My daughter named her when she was 10. We gave him a proper burial in the backyard, and everyone said something nice about him.

Do you have any sisters?

Elizabeth Perkins: I have two older sisters; yes, I’m the youngest, but I play the oldest in this (Must Love Dogs) which was revenge for me!

Did you ever try to fix them up or did they ever try to fix you up?

Elizabeth Perkins: Um, my middle sister tried to fix me up a few times. My sisters are very academically inclined so whenever they would fix me up, it would always be from someone in their world, people they would find attractive and that only lasted a few times. They wore suits and when they came to the door in suits, it was over.

How do you think romantic comedies stay fresh?

Elizabeth Perkins: I think what’s great about what Gary [David Goldberg] does is pretty much everyone in this movie is someone that everyone would know. He very much goes for the every man and creating characters that are completely recognizable and accessible, almost everyone. I think that makes it that much more real; I don’t think this is one of those forced comedies where the music is coming out of no where and it’s a little more subtle than that. I had worked with Gary on a short-lived series called Battery Park that really came and went on ABC a few years ago and I adore him; Gary and I have a short hand that I can look over at him and we laugh and I always call him ‘boss’ and he likes that. He’s just a simple man to work with; you can feel the relationship with the director. If a scene is playing too long, he’s not going to come on set and say ‘I needed it at 3:20 and now it’s coming in at 3:50.’ He’s not that kind of director, it’s all about the relationship between the people.

How was the relationship between you and your movie sisters?

Elizabeth Perkins: No, not at all. Actually, I was hired on a Friday and I started that Monday. Gary called me and asked me to do it; he didn’t realize that Diane and I have been the dearest of friends for about 15 years. So the relationship came naturally; it’s almost a little too close to home, but also the fact that I come from a home of two sisters. It was just like gliding into first base, very simple to fall into Carol. So how difficult was it to come in on such short notice?

Elizabeth Perkins: Well, if it weren’t for all these great people it might have been harder and if it hadn’t been Gary, it may have been difficult. But, I’ve known Dermot for 25 years, I’ve known Stockard for 15, Diane for 15, I’ve known everyone for a very long time and it felt like I was coming home to a family instead of walking in and not knowing anyone.

Did you have time for rehearsal?

Elizabeth Perkins: No, he didn’t like to rehearse. I think he felt, in terms of the ability to shoot because he was doing one camera, and he had a really nice schedule because it was Warner Brothers, that he could give time for the actors to find it. Because when you’re dealing with a large ensemble cast, there’s a lot of character choices coming and going. He really allowed us to find ourselves on film.

How did you perceive your character?

Elizabeth Perkins: Bossy! She’s just the classic older sister, get your nose out of my life, but secretly I love it cause it shows that you love me. And I think that Carol is a bit jealous because she’s just gone out in the dating world which is fun. I think secretly she’d like to put herself on the internet and see who’d respond. I don’t think she’d act on it, but it’d be an interesting thing to do.

Why do you and Diane and you get along so well?

Elizabeth Perkins: Well, we both went through a period of our lives where we were both single mothers together; she was divorced from Christopher Lambert and I was divorced from my daughter’s father and it was just the two of us with our two daughters who are a year apart, a little over a year apart, both of us trying to figure out the dating scene; neither of us really wanting to date. And it became a real friendship, and then we both met different men in our lives, but the relationship has remained.

Have your daughters remained good friends as well?

Elizabeth Perkins: Yeah, but they’re not really friends, they’re sisters, cause they are both only children and both girls so they’d look at each other as sisters. We’d spend the night over at their house and sleep in the tent and we became very close because we were both raising daughters alone in LA.

Would you ever consider going on the internet and looking for a relationship?

Elizabeth Perkins: Well, I think if I wasn’t an actress, I might; you know, if I put my picture out there – isn’t that? (laughter) like ‘I want to be with her, she’s got money!’ Yeah, if I wasn’t in the industry, yeah, I’d definitely consider it. My dear friend from high school, she’d go from relationship to relationship; one would last a year, one would last eight months, one would last two years, but never really found her soul mate, finally went to internet dating and found a guy and they’ve been together for six years. She’s still never going to get married, but it’s been her longest and most fruitful relationship. But based on her experience I’d definitely do it, particularly if you’re middle aged cause where’re you going to go to meet someone? You’re not going to go to a bar, you’re not going to go to a night club; and, of course, there are the museums, but you sort of get a little uncomfortable with that because that doesn’t lead to any long term relationship – it’s sort of a mutual attraction only. As you get older, it’s probably a very viable way to meet people.

You’ve said that you’ve known all these people for a long time, what’s that like knowing that you’re going to work on a movie all together?

Elizabeth Perkins: It’s just going to be a big party, that’s the biggest thing and you’re shooting on the studio lot, people park your car for you and they bring you breakfast and it’s just a luxury and it doesn’t happen very often that you get to work with some really good friends of yours and there’s a common language between everyone, you don’t have to explain what you’re doing, you can just run with it. It makes it just so much easier and more relaxed.

How was working with Christopher Plummer as your dad?

Elizabeth Perkins: I thought that he was going to be the king, I thought that he would be so refined. But I didn’t realize that he had such a wicked sense of humor, kind of a dastardly sense of humor, and he’s extremely sexy and that took me a little by surprise. He’d very quietly whisper in your ear, and he’s always touching, but not in a lecherous type of way. He’s extremely warm and I guess I always saw him as this staunch man, you know from The Sound of Music straight through everything. It wasn’t that at all, he was extremely down to earth. We had a really good cast, we were really lucky.

Do you ever take your dogs for a walk in the park?

Elizabeth Perkins: Well, the dog park is a specific thing as appose to when you’re walking because it’s safer; you know, if someone walks up to you and starts talking to you, you don’t grab your pocket book and go for the cell phone. I was thinking it’s probably one of the best pick up places out there, especially the small dog area, because it seems like all the good looking people have smaller dogs these days (laughter). Especially for the women, because they always come in with their little Chihuahuas and the guys come in with their Golden Retrievers and stand at the gate (laughter). I’m not really paying attention because I’ve got my two, but I have noticed it before. But it makes sense, there’s this cute little thing in the middle of you, you can talk about how cute it is.

How did you meet Diane?

Elizabeth Perkins: We did a film together called Indian Summer many years ago; I think my daughter was less than a year old. It was about a group of people who go back to camp and revisit the camp they went to. That was another great cast, it had Bill Paxton and Kevin Pollak.

How do you feel about doing family movies opposed to other genres?

Elizabeth Perkins: My kids are old enough now that they can watch that, but I like to do the family movies. I’m doing a series on Showtime called Weeds, which is about marijuana, so I’m going to be the ‘marijuana mom’ at school now. I keep saying it’s a metaphor, it’s not really about the marijuana. But as they grow up, I can branch out a little more, but I tend to be drawn to wholesome films.

Do your kids want to get in the business or do you want them to get into the business?

Elizabeth Perkins: My oldest step-son wants to direct or produce; he makes a lot of short films. As far as being an actor, I’ve already told them they have to wait until they’re 18; I won’t take them to auditions. My daughter’s kind of interested in it, but it’s not really running in their blood, but that might change. Right now, she’s just rolling her eyes at everything I do; I’m just an embarrassment. I was trying on this dress last night and she came in and said ‘Why don’t you wear that when you pick me up from school?’ (lots of laughter). ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll wear my best dress.’ I’m just an embarrassment on every level.

 

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Elizabeth Perkins and “Must Love Dogs:” Elizabeth Perkins stars as Diane Lane’s sister in the romantic comedy, “Must Love Dogs,” from Warner Bros Pictures. Lane plays Sarah Nolan, a divorced preschool teacher who is wary of the dating scene. Unwilling to take the first step for herself, Sarah’s sisters, Carol (Perkins) and Christine (Ali Hillis), decide to take drastic measures. Pretending to be Sarah, Carol and Christine post a profile on an online dating site in hopes their sister will get back into the game.

Elizabeth Perkins on Playing Diane Lane’s Sister: “It’s like going to work with your best friend, so it’s not really even like going to work. It’s sort of, ‘Let’s go and play and have a good time.’ We were just making this fun comedy with Stockard Channing, John Cusack, and Dermot Mulroney, so I wouldn’t have called it work. It wasn’t like we were really even making a film. It was more like we were all hanging out in a kitchen together.”

On Spending Time Together with Diane Lane When the Cameras Weren’t Rolling: “Diane and I have been really good friends for about 12 years now, so we usually spent every lunch together and after work and before work…”

On Her Character Getting to Boss Around Lane’s Character: “Oh yeah, that was great! Diane needs bossing. Trust me. (Laughing) She just can’t handle her own career at all. I have to handle everything for her.”

Elizabeth Perkins on Working with Writer/Director Gary David Goldberg: “Oh, Gary was the best. He would be strict about certain things, in terms of like the comic pacing. But in terms of playing around with the dialogue, he was just so kind and giving and he’s just a real comedic talent. He’s unbelievable.”

How Does She Feel About Dogs?: “We have two and we have two cats and fish so we’re animal people.

 

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In the romantic comedy “Must Love Dogs,” Elizabeth Perkins and Diane Lane play sisters. Meddling, interfering sisters who can’t stay out of each other’s business. In fact, the arch and wise-cracking Carol (Perkins’ character) prods her newly divorced sis, Sarah (Lane), into re-entering the dating market by throwing Sarah’s profile onto an Internet dating service.

Interpersonal mayhem ensues, with Sarah experiencing a series of appalling first dates before two more suitable candidates (played by John Cusack and Dermot Mulroney) enter the picture. Followed by dogs.

While character traits may differ and there are no blood ties between the two women, the two actresses say there are almost as close in real life as Carol and Sarah. Friends for more than 13 years, Perkins, 44, and Lane 40, first shared the screen in “Indian Summer” (1993) and, over the years, have spent more than a few evenings at each other’s homes while both were single mothers raising daughters in L.A.

Think “Dogs’ ” hapless Sarah has it rough with all those goofy dates? Try testing the waters again as a divorced celebrity at a time when there was no perfectmatch.com to help things along.

Not that either Lane (a future Oscar nominee for “Unfaithful”) or Perkins (the former Wilma Flintstone) could easily specify preferences and dislikes on an electronic matchmaking site. Or that either one was even ready to do so when their friendship was blossoming.

“Neither of us really wanted to date,” recalls Perkins. “So it was just easier for us to get together and go to a restaurant or go to a park, go to a movie. We spent a lot of time – two single women with their children going out to movies and discussing, ‘Well, maybe we should start going out on dates.’ ”

“It’s nice because she’s always a little bit ahead of me in experience, in motherhood and work,” Lane says of Perkins. “So it’s nice to have somebody I can consult with. We have a lot of similar experience, and there’s an endless supply of banter.” As things turned out, comfort and familiarity spread throughout the cast, in large part because Perkins – a late addition to “Must Love Dogs” – had long friendships with practically everybody in the principal cast, from Lane to Mulroney to Stockard Channing as well as with writer/director Gary David Goldberg.

As things turned out, comfort and familiarity spread throughout the cast, in large part because Perkins – a late addition to “Must Love Dogs” – had long friendships with practically everybody in the principal cast, from Lane to Mulroney to Stockard Channing as well as with writer/director Gary David Goldberg.

“My nickname among my group of friends is ‘Mother,’ and I tend to take care of everybody,” Perkins says. “Making this movie was sort of like an old-home week.” Perkins and Lane – who will appear together again in the upcoming “Fierce People” – still banter, albeit over different subjects. The friends who once were married and then single mothers together now have second marriages and stepchildren. Perkins took the replunge first in 2000, marrying cinematographer Julio Macata, who she met while filming the remake of “Miracle on 34th Street.”

Lane would wed actor Josh Brolin a few years later. In the interim, however, how did she take the news of her single-mom comrade in arms armed for war; in a state of hostility.

Lane would wed actor Josh Brolin a few years later. In the interim, however, how did she take the news of her single-mom comrade in arms leaving the market? After some name-calling, says Perkins, laughing, “Then she’d say, ‘Well I guess I can’t come over tonight because I guess !ital!he’s coming over.’ But, actually, she was very supportive, and she and my husband are very good friends. Both the families are very close.”

Carol is one of “Must Love Dogs’ ” few happily partnered characters. Pretty much everyone else we encounter is looking for love, including boat builder Jake (Cusack), preschool dad Bob (Mulroney) and even Sarah and Carol’s recently widowed father, Bill (Christopher Plummer) who also takes to the Internet and meets with considerably more success than his daughter.

The film, which opens Friday, is set in L.A., not an easy city in which to meaningfully hook up. Perkins, who was divorced from actor Terry Kinney, recalls L.A. as being “probably one of the loneliest places to be raising a child alone.”

“You put your daughter to bed at 7:30, and there you are,” she says. “Once you get over the relationship you left, it’s very difficult to move on from that point because you know whoever’s going to enter into your life, it’s not just you anymore. It’s also your child.”

For obvious reasons, celebrities aren’t typically the ones people find posting profiles on Web dating sites, meaning they have to meet people the old-fashioned way. Although she’s never done it, Perkins says it’s not unheard of for an actor with an interest in another actor to set up an encounter via their respective publicists. If you want to find someone outside the industry, however, that’s when things can get tricky, according to Perkins.

“You don’t necessarily always want to be with someone who works in your business,” she says. “It takes a certain kind of couple that are both actors to be able to make it, and it takes a certain kind of ego and lack of competition and ability to really sustain a relationship while you’re spending a lot of time apart. I’m with a cinematographer. He’s very stable, and I’m highly neurotic – so it works.”

Like director Goldberg (“Family Ties,” “Dad”) Lane collected people’s stories in conducting research for Sarah’s lonely-heart odyssey. The story is adapted from the novel by Claire Cook, which has Sarah’s sister placing a personal ad, not an online profile.

“I’ve heard that you can sort of loiter in bookstores and people see what you’re reading. That’s a pickup place now instead of bars,” says Lane, who was formerly married to actor Christopher Lambert. “Where else? The doggie park as well. You can sort of ambulate around and pretend you’re not scouring. The jokes are there in our script, and they’re very accurate. You can go to Home Depot and pretend to be a damsel in distress. It’s very funny what people do to avoid being overly intentional.”

And the Internet?

“Look, it’s so interesting, because being a mom of a daughter – forget about it,” says Lane. “I’m so hyper mama-bear protective: ‘In no way is it ever all right to meet anybody you’ve (only) ever met online! Period! End of story. Close chapter, end the book.’ But in my prickly, paranoid way, I’d say, ‘Well don’t they kind of prescreen people at these agencies?’ So I like the fact these services exist, and I think if you’re meeting someone randomly outside the protection of the umbrella, you know you can’t say you weren’t warned.”

Perkins and Lane will have little screen time together in Griffin Dunne’s “Fierce People.” The two women play the mothers of boys who befriend each other and eventually become enemies.

The two women remain close, as do their daughters, who are 14 and 11 and tight friends.

Actually, that’s not quite right.

“They’re not really friends,” says Perkins. “They’re sisters.”

 

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Elizabeth Perkins has come a long way in the few years since she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 44. “I’m actually a happier person than I was before I was diagnosed,” she tells the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA) consumer magazine, Diabetes Forecast, in the February 2008 issue.

In this exclusive interview Perkins discusses her diagnosis, treatment regimen, and the ways in which having diabetes has made an impact on her Hollywood career.

Perkins, who has received multiple award nominations for her role in the critically acclaimed Showtime series Weeds, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2005 while filming the first season of the show.

“I felt completely overwhelmed that first year on the show, and I didn’t tell anybody I had diabetes.  All of a sudden I was in my trailer at work, testing my glucose, and shooting myself up, and I was really scared and felt very alone and completely in over my head…it took me a good year and a half to embrace this and say, proudly, ‘I’m diabetic and I’m in control of my disease.’”

Type 1 diabetes commonly develops in children, but can occur at any age.

Although Perkins was already familiar with healthy dieting and regular exercise to stay fit for the cameras, having diabetes allowed Perkins to make another important change in her lifestyle.

“I really learned to listen to my body and to know what I needed.  And there are times I need to rest, and before I never allowed myself to do that.”

The experience of coping with the illness has helped Perkins to develop her Weeds character, Celia Hodes.

“I was testing my blood, learning how to draw syringes, and injecting myself, unbeknownst to everybody around me…I think that definitely translated into my character: I was just sort of out on a limb, on my own, and there was not going to be anybody to save me except myself.”  And now?  “I’m actually a happier person than I was before I was diagnosed.  I have a much greater perspective on the world around me.”

 

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Elizabeth Perkins goes to the dog park in her new film.

From playing Tom Hanks’ love interest in Big to Wilma Flinstone in The Flintstones, Elizabeth Perkins has been around the world of Hollywood. She’s playing the very protective sister of Diane Lane in her new movie Must Love Dogs.

The film brings together some of Elizabeth’s best friends in the industry from Diane, Dermot Mulroney, Stockard Channing, and Christopher Plummer.

In the film, she decides to put Diane’s profile on an internet dating site to help her find a man. But would Elizabeth do that in real life? Read our interview to find out:

Do you own a dog?

Elizabeth Perkins: Yes, I own two dogs – Buster and Lulu, they’re both rescue pups. Buster is a Boston terrier Chihuahua and Lulu is a miniature Rhodesian Ridgeback cause she has a ridge, she howls, yet she only weighs seven pounds. Yes, I have two cats, four fish, and we used to have a mouse named Fluffball, but he just died a couple weeks ago. My daughter named her when she was 10. We gave him a proper burial in the backyard, and everyone said something nice about him.

Do you have any sisters?

Elizabeth Perkins: I have two older sisters; yes, I’m the youngest, but I play the oldest in this (Must Love Dogs) which was revenge for me!

Did you ever try to fix them up or did they ever try to fix you up?

Elizabeth Perkins: Um, my middle sister tried to fix me up a few times. My sisters are very academically inclined so whenever they would fix me up, it would always be from someone in their world, people they would find attractive and that only lasted a few times. They wore suits and when they came to the door in suits, it was over.

How do you think romantic comedies stay fresh?

Elizabeth Perkins: I think what’s great about what Gary [David Goldberg] does is pretty much everyone in this movie is someone that everyone would know. He very much goes for the every man and creating characters that are completely recognizable and accessible, almost everyone. I think that makes it that much more real; I don’t think this is one of those forced comedies where the music is coming out of no where and it’s a little more subtle than that. I had worked with Gary on a short-lived series called Battery Park that really came and went on ABC a few years ago and I adore him; Gary and I have a short hand that I can look over at him and we laugh and I always call him ‘boss’ and he likes that. He’s just a simple man to work with; you can feel the relationship with the director. If a scene is playing too long, he’s not going to come on set and say ‘I needed it at 3:20 and now it’s coming in at 3:50.’ He’s not that kind of director, it’s all about the relationship between the people.

How was the relationship between you and your movie sisters?

Elizabeth Perkins: No, not at all. Actually, I was hired on a Friday and I started that Monday. Gary called me and asked me to do it; he didn’t realize that Diane and I have been the dearest of friends for about 15 years. So the relationship came naturally; it’s almost a little too close to home, but also the fact that I come from a home of two sisters. It was just like gliding into first base, very simple to fall into Carol.

So how difficult was it to come in on such short notice?

Elizabeth Perkins: Well, if it weren’t for all these great people it might have been harder and if it hadn’t been Gary, it may have been difficult. But, I’ve known Dermot for 25 years, I’ve known Stockard for 15, Diane for 15, I’ve known everyone for a very long time and it felt like I was coming home to a family instead of walking in and not knowing anyone.

Did you have time for rehearsal?

Elizabeth Perkins: No, he didn’t like to rehearse. I think he felt, in terms of the ability to shoot because he was doing one camera, and he had a really nice schedule because it was Warner Brothers, that he could give time for the actors to find it. Because when you’re dealing with a large ensemble cast, there’s a lot of character choices coming and going. He really allowed us to find ourselves on film.

How did you perceive your character?

Elizabeth Perkins: Bossy! She’s just the classic older sister, get your nose out of my life, but secretly I love it cause it shows that you love me. And I think that Carol is a bit jealous because she’s just gone out in the dating world which is fun. I think secretly she’d like to put herself on the internet and see who’d respond. I don’t think she’d act on it, but it’d be an interesting thing to do.

Why do you and Diane and you get along so well?

Elizabeth Perkins: Well, we both went through a period of our lives where we were both single mothers together; she was divorced from Christopher Lambert and I was divorced from my daughter’s father and it was just the two of us with our two daughters who are a year apart, a little over a year apart, both of us trying to figure out the dating scene; neither of us really wanting to date. And it became a real friendship, and then we both met different men in our lives, but the relationship has remained.

Have your daughters remained good friends as well?

Elizabeth Perkins: Yeah, but they’re not really friends, they’re sisters, cause they are both only children and both girls so they’d look at each other as sisters. We’d spend the night over at their house and sleep in the tent and we became very close because we were both raising daughters alone in LA.

Would you ever consider going on the internet and looking for a relationship?

Elizabeth Perkins: Well, I think if I wasn’t an actress, I might; you know, if I put my picture out there – isn’t that? (laughter) like ‘I want to be with her, she’s got money!’ Yeah, if I wasn’t in the industry, yeah, I’d definitely consider it. My dear friend from high school, she’d go from relationship to relationship; one would last a year, one would last eight months, one would last two years, but never really found her soul mate, finally went to internet dating and found a guy and they’ve been together for six years. She’s still never going to get married, but it’s been her longest and most fruitful relationship. But based on her experience I’d definitely do it, particularly if you’re middle aged cause where’re you going to go to meet someone? You’re not going to go to a bar, you’re not going to go to a night club; and, of course, there are the museums, but you sort of get a little uncomfortable with that because that doesn’t lead to any long term relationship – it’s sort of a mutual attraction only. As you get older, it’s probably a very viable way to meet people.

You’ve said that you’ve known all these people for a long time, what’s that like knowing that you’re going to work on a movie all together?

Elizabeth Perkins: It’s just going to be a big party, that’s the biggest thing and you’re shooting on the studio lot, people park your car for you and they bring you breakfast and it’s just a luxury and it doesn’t happen very often that you get to work with some really good friends of yours and there’s a common language between everyone, you don’t have to explain what you’re doing, you can just run with it. It makes it just so much easier and more relaxed.

How was working with Christopher Plummer as your dad?

Elizabeth Perkins: I thought that he was going to be the king, I thought that he would be so refined. But I didn’t realize that he had such a wicked sense of humor, kind of a dastardly sense of humor, and he’s extremely sexy and that took me a little by surprise. He’d very quietly whisper in your ear, and he’s always touching, but not in a lecherous type of way. He’s extremely warm and I guess I always saw him as this staunch man, you know from The Sound of Music straight through everything. It wasn’t that at all, he was extremely down to earth. We had a really good cast, we were really lucky.

Do you ever take your dogs for a walk in the park?

Elizabeth Perkins: Well, the dog park is a specific thing as appose to when you’re walking because it’s safer; you know, if someone walks up to you and starts talking to you, you don’t grab your pocket book and go for the cell phone. I was thinking it’s probably one of the best pick up places out there, especially the small dog area, because it seems like all the good looking people have smaller dogs these days (laughter). Especially for the women, because they always come in with their little Chihuahuas and the guys come in with their Golden Retrievers and stand at the gate (laughter). I’m not really paying attention because I’ve got my two, but I have noticed it before. But it makes sense, there’s this cute little thing in the middle of you, you can talk about how cute it is.

How did you meet Diane?

Elizabeth Perkins: We did a film together called Indian Summer many years ago; I think my daughter was less than a year old. It was about a group of people who go back to camp and revisit the camp they went to. That was another great cast, it had Bill Paxton and Kevin Pollak.

How do you feel about doing family movies opposed to other genres?

Elizabeth Perkins: My kids are old enough now that they can watch that, but I like to do the family movies. I’m doing a series on Showtime called Weeds, which is about marijuana, so I’m going to be the ‘marijuana mom’ at school now. I keep saying it’s a metaphor, it’s not really about the marijuana. But as they grow up, I can branch out a little more, but I tend to be drawn to wholesome films.

Do your kids want to get in the business or do you want them to get into the business?

Elizabeth Perkins: My oldest step-son wants to direct or produce; he makes a lot of short films. As far as being an actor, I’ve already told them they have to wait until they’re 18; I won’t take them to auditions. My daughter’s kind of interested in it, but it’s not really running in their blood, but that might change. Right now, she’s just rolling her eyes at everything I do; I’m just an embarrassment. I was trying on this dress last night and she came in and said ‘Why don’t you wear that when you pick me up from school?’ (lots of laughter). ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll wear my best dress.’ I’m just an embarrassment on every level.

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