And yet as wonderful as this entire cast is, your storyline, your scenes, are the ones I gravitated toward most. You’re the reason to watch.
I should say thank you first as a cordial human adult, but I have to immediately jump in after that and say, 99.999% of it is the words on the page. When there’s a script like this script, all you have to do is show up, say the words, and say them honestly, and your performance is done. If there’s any credit due to me, it’s in getting my nerves down enough to be able to just be present and say the words that were already there for me.
I will never forget on the first day we were shooting a scene with all of us around the table. I had just met everyone, but it was like, Now you’re supposed to be friends of 30 years, putting hands on each other and being physically comfortable, laughing at each other’s jokes. I had to say a line, and in the script it said, “Everyone chuckles at what Anne just said.” Well, in that moment, I remember being completely out of my body and instead of saying the line, I just vomited out the phrase, “I’m really nervous, you guys!”
Haha, good for you.
I think that’s something about being in my 50s. I just tell the truth now. I am not worried about trying to hold up the appearance all the time, that I know what I’m doing or that I’m comfortable in every situation, because in my head, I’m still just Kerri. Whether I’m 25 or 55, it’s the same Kerri, and she’s uncomfortable at times and doesn’t know what she’s doing a lot of the time.
So what happened when you said, “I’m really nervous”?
The whole room let out a sigh of relief. Tina said, “Oh, I’m so glad you just said something! Because I’m just remembering, like, what do people do with their hands when they talk?” And Steve and Will both said, “Yeah, I do the same thing.” Right when I’m starting a new show or a new movie, I am like, Do I know how to do this? Do I remember how to do this? It’s universal in this business, at least with this group of actors, and if this group of actors is feeling it, I would suspect almost all actors are feeling it.
But everybody’s nervous, and that just made me feel like, Okay, if everybody’s feeling this way, I can do this. We were off and running right from then, day one, just off and running and comfortable. In one of our press junket interviews, I heard Tina say, “I just wanted to do a show where middle-aged people are sitting around wearing comfortable sweaters and flat shoes and just see if the world would be interested [in watching that].” The whole show, that’s what it really felt like. It was just comfort on every level.