HFPA in Conversation: the Eclectic, Masterful Judith Light
She is known for socially conscious TV shows like Ugly Betty and Transparent, but Judith Light didn’t search specifically for those projects. Regardless of who she is playing, the character has to be important to her, Light told HFPA journalist Gabriel Lerman at the Rogers and Cowan office in Century City. “If I had tried to orchestrate what has happened for me, I could never have done that in a million years. I happened to meet Silvio Horta and I did a pilot for him that didn’t get picked up by ABC. And he looked at me after that and he said to me, I will put you in something else. He is a man of his word. Along comes Ugly Betty. I wasn’t in the pilot, but right after the show won the Golden Globe, he called me and he said, here’s the part, this is what I want you to do,” she recalls and continues. “It’s about relationships to me and about meeting people and how you formulate those kinds of connections. They fit in with the world that I like to operate in. I think playing all different kinds of women is extremely essential to me, what I can bring to those women.”
In her five-decade career on stage, television, and film she has been nominated and won several different awards, including two consecutive Tony awards for the Best Featured Actress in a Play in 2012 (Other Desert Cities) and 2013 (The Assembled Parties). In 2016 she received a Golden Globe nomination for her work in Transparent and lastly, she got an Emmy nomination for her performance as Marilyn Miglin in the limited series The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. “I thought it was such an interesting story culturally as to how this young man had been so closeted by his parents and by the culture and that the way the world looked at him and treated him, pushed him to kill more people.”
Early in her career, she understood that she can’t seek anybody’s validation. “If you keep looking for approval from somebody, you can’t get yourself anywhere really that has any kind of depth. And that was when I realized that we’re in a service business, we’re here to serve people, we’re here to give people a psychological understanding, an emotional understanding of a character, and we’re here to give a performance. That’s what our job is.”
Listen to the podcast and learn more about Light’s life: when she realized for the first time she wanted to be an actress; why she wanted to study theatre in college; what she did when everything didn’t go as she planned; what advice she would give younger actresses; how she learned she has deep emotional reactions; why she thought she would become a sign language teacher;what she learned from the soap opera One Life to Live; why she didn’t return to theatre for over two decades; why she and her husband, Robert Desiderio, decided not to have kids; and what are the pros and cons of being married to a person who understands the entertainment business.
Listen to the conversation here or, for immediate access to all of our podcasts, subscribe to HFPA in Conversation on iTunes.
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HFPA in Conversation: Darren Criss, the Multitalented ‘Piano Man”
HFPA journalist Ruben Nepales met Darren Criss on a busy day at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills. Recently, Criss has been seen on FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story playing a serial killer based on real-life criminal Andrew Cunanan. He is currently touring with his Gleeco-star Lea Michele.
At the beginning of this interview, Criss looks back to his childhood and confesses he didn’t like performing if he was told to do so. “If it was on my own fruition to do a song and dance number, then I’d be happy to. I guess I always wanted to because I enjoyed it, but if you told me to do something, I was like, no way.”
He grew up in San Francisco and Honolulu in a family he describes as very musical. “I grew up in a household where a lot of singing and music was around.”
In high school he was given a choice: did he want to be an Oscar or Grammy winner in the yearbook. “It was polite way to say you did music or theatre. And because I did both I got to choose. And the only reason why I chose the Grammy was because I thought it’d be a fun picture with my friend Michelle because we both played a ton of instruments, so I brought all my instruments and we took like a fun yearbook photo.”
After college, he formed a musical theatre StarKid with his friends and played Harry Potter on stage. In an interesting overlap, later in his life, he’d replace Daniel Radcliffe in the play How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. “When we met, I didn’t bring it up because I think it’s the pink elephant in the room. But this was years ago when I met him right before I did the show. He’s always been very friendly. We see each other around town every now and then and there are more interesting things to talk about than Harry Potter when we’re together for the brief moments we are together.”
Listen to the podcast to learn what he thinks about his stage debut at ten years old, what being a younger brother means to him, why he likes to introduce people to each other, why being part of Glee was like a lottery ticket for him, why he is only a piano man in his and his fiancée’s piano bar, Tramp Stamp Granny’s, how playing Andrew Cunanan affected him and what he seeks from the future – amongst other things.
HFPA in Conversation: Darren Criss, the Multitalented ‘Piano Man”
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