By Harry Haun
15 Aug 2010
After six years of series television and two feature films, playing Miranda Hobbes to Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw on/in "Sex and the City," Nixon must have been a foregone conclusion for the sidekick slot opposite Cathy Jamison.
Cynthia Nixon photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN
But this new character is hardly a carbon copy, the actress hastily pointed out. "Rebecca is Cathy's long-lost best-friend," she said. "Basically, they were best friends in college and just after. Then, our friendship had a falling-out because my character is a little boy-crazy. There are a lot of events in our life together where I would prioritize a guy that I'd just met over her. This includes not showing up at her wedding where I was the maid of honor, and that was kinda the final straw.
"But, when her husband throws her a 43rd surprise birthday party, I'm the big surprise. He has been in therapy because their marriage has been on the rocks, and he remembered how Cathy and I used to sit around talking all the time and realizes, since they've been married and had their nice little suburban life, she hasn't had a pal like me — and maybe that's what's missing in her life and making her unhappy."
Rebecca is a zesty presence along side Cathy. "I think she's hilarious, full of life and determined to have a good time, but she's really kind of a mess. She's one of those people you could forgive when she's 25, but she's 43 and you think, 'Oh, honey, you've really got to get it together. You're too old to do this kind of partying, going from one-night stand to another. You gotta put down roots and get some balance.'
Nixon said her own brush with the big C had nothing to do with her taking on this assignment. "The prognosis Cathy gets is really, really devastating and terrible, which was not my case, but I feel like any time you have a health scare it does make you kinda look around at your life and kinda reassess your priorities and really realize, 'I'm not going to be here forever. Am I really on the track I want to be on? Am I really making sure that I do those things that I've always been meaning to get to?'
"You know, my cancer was so small, and it was found so early. It was honestly not much to recover from. The treatment itself was the main recovery. I surely wasn't expecting it, but I wouldn't say I was surprised, really. My mother had it twice so I didn't find it so unexpected. And, I gotta tell you, so many people get it nowadays."
If "The Big C" does nothing more than raise public awareness of the disease, it will be work well done — and the fact that Showtime has managed to mix a little mirth into the message doesn't phase Nixon a bit. "The series is a dramedy — that's what it is, that's the genre — and I think it's nice nowadays," she pointed out. "Other than one of those Judd Apatow films, I think you would be hard-put to find comedies that are purely comedies or dramas that are purely dramas anymore. I think people have a lot of fun mixing styles nowadays, and obviously I think that is much more what life is like. It feels like a tragedy one minute and a slapstick comedy the next."
Nixon enters the "Big C" picture midway through the season — in Episode Seven on Oct. 4 — and, by then, Linney will be relapsing into an old war injury on Broadway.
On Oct. 7 she resumes her Tony-nominated portrayal of a sidelined photojournalist, opposite Brian d'Arcy James and Eric Bogosian, at the Cort Theatre in Time Stands Still. These days, for Linney, either it stands still or it moves a season a year.
(Harry Haun is the staff writer for Playbill magazine. Write him at hahaun@aol.com.)
