Jean Smart: ‘Watchmen’ is a gift
The HBO show has bagged 26 nominations at the Emmys
Jean Smart, a veteran of Designing Women, 24 and Fargo among many other projects, has most recently added HBO’s Watchmen to her list of credits.
The limited series, created by Damon Lindelof and based on a graphic novel, is set in an alternate history where masked vigilantes go after criminals decades after the actual Tulsa race massacre in 1921. The show dominated the recent Emmy nominations, vying in 26 categories. Smart plays Laurie Blake, a reformed vigilante turned no-nonsense FBI agent who has some internal conflicts of her own.
“You’ve got to see so much of her public and totally private moments. It really was a gift as an actor,” Smart says of the series.
In this excerpt, she shares some details about what she has coming up next.
Laurie Blake is called in to Tulsa to investigate the death of Police Chief Jed Crawford. How much did you know about the story and the real-world massacre of Black citizens in Tulsa?
I knew nothing about that. It was shocking to me, shocking that I had never heard of it. And my father was a history teacher. It’s astonishing to think how prophetic the show was in a way, because first with the coronavirus and the idea that something happened that gave the entire world a common enemy and that that would help bring peace if we had something big to fight together. But then it was set against a historical event of unbelievable brutality against the Black community. It’s just incredible that Damon wrote that right before all of this happened.
What was your crash course into the world of
Watchmen?
I went out for drinks with one of the writers and she gave me a lot of information about Laurie’s background, her family and her relationships, because I knew nothing about it. Watchmen wasn’t something that my son had been into when he was growing up. I always feel like research is good. Just to a point, I mean, it was actually very valuable to know about her parents and her personal relationships. But research only goes so far. You have to base it really on the script.
Well, how is it to be part of art that takes on subject matter like this head-on?
Oh, it’s great. This is what actors crave. I mean, yes, sometimes you want to do stuff that’s just fun and just entertainment.
But there was a quote from an actor a long time ago that said, “As an actor, if you want to believe that you can affect people in your audience in a good way, in a positive way, open their eyes to something.”
You also have to accept the fact that you can be a negative influence as well. You have to make your own personal wise choices about the kind of material you do. So you get to do something like Watchmen, it’s extremely rewarding. And it was nice that the audience responded the way it did. Of course, we had no idea what was coming. Like I said, it’s prophetic to an alarming degree.
What were you working on before stay-at-home orders from the pandemic?
I actually just got a deal producing a movie that I might also be in for Amblin. It is a combination of somewhat topical and also very uplifting and entertaining, hopefully a working title as Miss
Macy. I hope it turns into something in the way that we envision it right now. I’m also in the middle of another one, a miniseries with Kate Winslet.
“It’s astonishing to think how prophetic the show was in a way, because first with the coronavirus and the idea that something happened that gave the entire world a common enemy.”
JEAN SMART ★ Actress