Happy MLK day

Last week I was one of the hosts of a party to welcome the delightful and crazy talented Darren Criss to Broadway, where he is performing a short season in How To Succeed In Business Without Realy Trying.  It was a total hoot and Darren performed a few numbers himself, starting with my favourtie song ever sung by a mermaid, Part Of Your World. This is a funny picture: Parker Posey - another host of the evening and my current ex-wife in The Good Wife, Darren, Grant my husband, and moi.

I am the new Ambassador for the Paul Taylor Dance Company. I am so excited to be connected with someone who is such a legend, and soon I will be posting a report from my most recent visit to the studio where I sat with Mr Taylor as he talked me through his latest creation that will have its world premiere during the company's debut season at Lincoln Center in March.  Meanwhile here I am busting some classic Taylor moves with Michael Trusnovec...


I was thinking the other day about all these GOP Presidential candidates frantically trying to outdo each other in ways to attract the evangelical vote in the primary states.  It is really fascinating to me how religion plays such a huge role in American politics and yet America prides itself on its constitutional edict about the separation of church and state. Uh, hello, it ain't happening babies!!  American society and politics is wracked with religion, it reeks of it.  And it goes to the very top and to the very left too. Can you imagine the uproar if President Obama did not finish a speech with the phrase 'God Bless America'?  Well, I can tell you that if a politician in Britian or most of the countries in Europe EVER mentioned God at the end of a speech there would be just as huge an uproar, but for the very reason that the American political system is supposedly designed to avoid!  Let's get God, or the Gods, out of politics and talk about the real issues.  I can't believe the candiates are actively wearing their piousness on their sleeves and yet again bringing up their aversion to abortion and gay rights as a way to show themselves capable Presidents. It's disgusting. Disgusting that the candidates pander to these people and disgusting that these people use religion as their only political compass.

I am going to be on Live with Kelly next Thursday January 25th.  The totally darling Kristin Chenoweth will be co-hsoting. We will be able to reminisce about dancing down the streets of the backlot at Paramount singing Easy Street in Annie, and also the other guest is Emmy Rossum who I bitch slapped big time in the movie Dare.  Can't wait!

Also, I am going to be playing Macbeth later this year for the National Theatre of Scotland. Well, not just Macbeth, all the parts actually. I have very strong connections to the play. It was the first play I was ever in as a professional actor, I was born very near Birnam Wood and my father's family were for generations workers on Cawdor estate. That is why this picture of the first Earl of Cawdor that hangs in the Drawing Room of Cawdor Castle fascinates me.  Doesn't it look very like the person whose blog you are reading right now?  Do you think there could have been a little dalliance with the help sometime in the last few centuries?! Maybe I am real Scottish royalty after all!!


And finally, here's to Martin Luther King Junior! This is a great quote by him, and rather apposite in terms of what I was saying about the GOP Presidential race:

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true


I just got back to New York City from Scotland and I feel very very thankful for the weekend I have had. I am not though a great fan of the origins of the Turkey day celebrations of last Thursday.  See below from New York magazine

The reason I went to Scotland was to take part in a Staging the Nation event for the National Theatre of Scotland about the traditions of Panto and Variety and how they have influenced both the performance style and also the material of contemporary Scottish theatre. The event was on Saturday lunch time in the Kings Theatre in Glasgow and was a total hoot. I was joined by some of Scotland's most amazing actors: Dave Anderson, Greg Hemphill, John Ramage, Johnny Beattie (legend!!), Juliet Cadzow, Maureen Beattie and Paul Riley. The show was a total example of what we were setting out to demonstrate: the way that Scottish theatre rarely has a fourth wall and the elements of language and song and dark humour and locality and above all warmth and heart are integral to the special relationship Scottish performers and audiences have. I am so thankful to have been there, andto experience that warmth and to realise I am steeeped in a tradition that allows me to be so open with an audience. And for just being Scottish actually.  Look at me getting all sentimental, and it's no even Hogmanay! 


I also did a press conference at which my one-man Macbeth was annouced. I will be playing all the parts in macbeth for the NTS next year, in Glasgow and then New York. Yes, all the parts. John Tiffany and Andy Goldberg are directing, mad fools that they are. I am very excited...

Here I am blabbing on about it on Scottish Television and also on the BBC

If you had told me when I was a little boy...

If you had told me when I was a little boy that I would be sitting in a room in New York City having an on-camera therapy session with Pamela Stephenson I would have thought you were nuts.  First of all, Pamela Stephenson was then part of the cast of Not The Nine O'Clock News, a hilarious and, without sounding too fluidy, seminal comedy show of the early eighties. Now she is a pyschologist and this morning I shot an interview with her that was basically a therapy session about being famous.  The thing about being famous is that you don't really talk about the real experience of it very often.  To do so with non-famous people is awkward and there is a lot of 'you should be so lucky, mate'  and with other famous people you sort of can but actually you don't really because it is so nice to know that someone just gets it and that you don't need to talk about it. Obviously being famous and what that means as you go about your business in the world is something I have a lot to say about but mostly I say to only my husband, very close friends, my own therapist and now, the lovely Pamela Stephenson.  I had a great time. I hope it turns out ok.

I have been having a lot of 'if you had told me whe I was a lttle boy/getting up this morning/etc' moments recently.  Partly I think it's due to Halloween and the flurry of extraordinary experiences I have been having.  I attended Bette Midler's Hulaween bash that benefits her amazing New York Restoration Project and I went as a monkey. Not a mouse as some of the tabloids supposed! A great time was had by all and a lot of cash was raised. Stevie Wonder performed, Bette wandered around being charming and hilarious.

Then on Saturday I had my own second annulal (I hope) Halloween extravagnaza at the the Soho Grand Hotel. It was another smashing evening. DJ Michael Cavadias had a lot to do with how incredible a night it was, but also my amazing friends and their genius costumes.  I went as a Victorian boxer. Natch.  We partied till the cows came home.

Then on Sunday and Monday I performed in Sleep No More, the amazing Punch Drunk, site-specific show at the McKitrick Hotel on West 27th st, NYC.  I have been to the show several times and am a big fan, and when they asked me to be a part of their special Halloween celebrations I was honored, and when they came to me and asked if I would like to be IN the performance and play a doctor and do 1 on 1s with audience members (behind a locked door I did a short wordless piece in the near dark in which I tucked them into a bed and eventually coughed up a piece of hardware!!), well, I was over the moon.  The show is incredible and I cannot exhort you enough to see it if you are in NYC.  I just loved being around the dancers and performers who I had seen from the other side as an audience member.  I have said many times that if I have a regret it is that I am not a dancer and that was only reinforced after spending time with these brilliant people.

Now I am back at work on The Good Wife. In this past weekend's episode I said a line which involved the words 'semen' and 'Bin Laden'.  Again, if you told me.....I can't believe it got past the censors. But the fact that I get to say things like that and work with the people I do is what makes this such an incredible show to work on. Today I am shooting my first ever major scenes with my colleague Josh Charles.  We have only said hello to each other over the last couple of years. Funny old world.

On Friday I will be in San Francisco singing for an Amfar event and on the weekend of the 12th I will be at the Denver Starz Film Festival receiving an Excellence in Acting award.

If you had told me when I was a little boy...

emmy schmemmy

I just got home from the Emmys. It was a hilarious evening. I sort of compare it to Christmas or Thanksgiving: You all meet up in LA, see people you only see at that time of the year, party it up like crazy and also get lots of presents, though sadly not, in my case, an award. But I am so happy for Peter Dinklage who won my category. I think he is brilliant and it couldn't have hapened to a nicer person. He is in one of my favourite films in the whole world, The Station Agent.

I also loved the range of insane reactions to my Jean-Paul Gaultier outfit. Either adulation or horror. I like that.

Here I am with Scott Westerfield, the author of the Leviathan trilogy about the third instalment, Goliath, and an interview I did in LA at the GBK Gifting Lounge.

emmys

I am off to the Emmys this weekend. I was just trying to explain to someone the horror of winning. Of course it is also lovely. I mean, you've won. Duh. The horror part is the getting up in front of literally millions of people and having to speak whilst you are in a state of high anxiety and emotion. It's awful. I am already having nightmares about it. Really. And the fact that I am an actor does not help much. There is no rehearsal, you have to write the script, you're not in a good state physically or mentally when it happens. I almost wish it wouldn't. Almost.

There is good swag and parties though.

Below isa wee film I made. The soundtrack is the version of That's Life I did for the movie Burlesque that ended on the cutting room floor, or the DVD extra, whichever way you look at it.