Debra Messing on reprising her role a decade on
… and yet, that’s exactly what ‘Will & Grace’ ended up doing. As the hit comedy about a gay-straight friendship returns, its star Debra Messing talks to Lidija Haas
When I meet Debra Messing, the Will &
Grace actress, in a hotel restaurant in uptown Manhattan, she is anxious about the time, as she has to take her 13-yearold son to a New York Rangers ice hockey game. It’s strange the next day, then, to see reports of their evening out across social media, as a result of an Instagram photo Messing posted of her teenager “taking a knee” for the National Anthem support of America’s current anthem protest movement. It’s a controversial action that leads to damning headlines from Fox News, among others.
Yet Messing – who spent months volunteering for Hillary Clinton during the presidential election, and refuses to accept the current administration – is defiant. “Life is getting harder for everybody because of Trump,” she says. “Every marginalised group has been put on notice in a way that is very, very scary and regressive.”
Whatever one’s view of her politics, it’s fair to say Messing knows a fair bit about challenging prejudice. She is indelibly associated with the role of Grace Adler on Will & Grace,
NBC’S hit sitcom about the friendship between a gay lawyer and a straight interior designer. The show, back on our screens after a 10-year hiatus, revolutionised the way gay characters were presented on mainstream TV when it was first broadcast in 1998. On the one hand, it had the character of Jack, the promiscuous, career-flitting exhibitionist who, as Messing puts it, embodied “the portrayal [of gay men] that the TV audience was used to – always the clown, the caricature, the character that you laughed at, you didn’t invest in.” Yet on the other there was Will, who bucked the stereotype of the flamboyant gay man and was instead a “deeply complicated, multifaceted guy that you’re really going to care about”. Messing points out that when the vice president, Joe Biden, announced his support for same-sex marriage in the US in 2012, he credited Will & Grace with doing more than anything else to increase American understanding and acceptance of the gay community. “It stopped me in my tracks and made me think in a new way about what the show was and is. When we first started we were never intending to have social or political impact.”
The new season is an odd mix of reassuring nostalgia and of-themoment satire. On the one hand, the four leads look the same – cue jokes about the difficulties of attracting younger men these days. So does the set – although the show’s traditional sitcom set-up, filmed in front of a live studio audience, “is anachronistic now, it’s not the norm”, as Messing points out.
On the other hand, the show is laced with political barbs: within the first few minutes, Karen, Grace’s dipsomaniac assistant – who helped Trump “pick out Melania” and has built a wall to keep her long-suffering maid Rosario out of the main house – has got Grace a gig redecorating the Oval Office, where she encounters Will trying to seduce his crush, the destructive new head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Mike Pence, meanwhile, makes a brief photo cameo in a scene set in a gay-conversion camp.
In fact, the sitcom’s comeback began as a political statement: originally, the four reunited last year to make a pro-clinton “get out to vote” sketch. Yet all the Hollywood backing that Clinton gathered over her rival came to naught in the end, with many arguing that such celebrity support was counterproductive, creating an us vs them narrative.
Messing remains unapologetic. It’s too easy, she says, “to get angry at celebrities who express themselves and to demean them and dismiss them... I have the equal right as anyone else to express my opinions, [but] my opinion is not more valid than any other person’s opinion”.
Just as she has been forthright in her resistance to Trump, so she has also been one of the actresses leading the charge against the allegations of sexual harassment sweeping through the entertainment industry, promoting a video featuring 16 women who have accused Trump of sexual assault, and regularly tweeting her support for those who have accused industry figures of sexual harassment.
The proliferation of #metoo stories, which has spread far beyond Hollywood, “made me realise that I hadn’t processed how many times I had actually been sexually harassed throughout my life”, she says. “We need people who are not white men to be in positions of power, that’s what has become most clear through all of this.”
To this end, she is one of the backers of the newly launched Times Up initiative, set up by women in Hollywood as an action plan to counter sexual harassment across all industries in America; that includes a legal fund for women unable to afford to defend themselves. Messing believes that it is the responsibility of stars like her to widen the story “and show support for women in every industry, because if you’re a farmhand and you’re being sexually harassed or assaulted, you’re not going to have the access to justice or advocacy that someone in Hollywood has”.
Her desire to stand up for the persecuted is rooted in her background, she says, as a Jewish
‘When the show ended I said, until the day I die I am going to be Grace, and I am not only fine with that, I’m grateful’
girl who grew up in a rural Catholic part of Rhode Island, where she graduated from high school as one of only four Jews in her class, and where anti-semitism “made me try and hide my identity to fit in”. Her Jewishness is very important to her – as it is to the character of Grace.
When Will & Grace began 20 years ago, Messing was motivated by “wanting to put a female character who was Jewish on prime-time television”. She points out the scarcity of Jewish women on TV at the time: even in Seinfeld (where Messing had an early turn as a secret bigot), though Jerry was Jewish, the lead female character, Elaine, was not. “So it was like, where are the Jewish female characters? Think about it. It’s always the men who are Jewish, and the women are the side roles, the annoying girlfriend, but never the lead.” Grace also stood out as a character in that she was actually funny: as Messing points out, sitcom heroines in the Nineties typically left the laughs to the supporting cast. A straight woman only in the sense of her orientation, she has always been essential to the show’s appeal, and back in the day, “tons and tons of Graces reached out” to Messing, sending pictures and letters. “When the show ended I said, until the day I die I am going to be Grace, and I am not only fine with that, I’m grateful for that.”
She is still frequently stopped on the street by excited women with their male friends who claim to be the real-life Will and Grace: “I’m straight and he’s gay,” they’ll say, “and we live together and we love each other!’” When I ask her what might be the core of these kinds of friendships, she doesn’t hesitate. The key is “the fact that there is no possibility for any sex… You can break up with a boyfriend and say, ‘Oh, we’re the best of friends’, but there is only so close that you can get before the possibility of it becoming sexual comes into play. And when it’s these two people it will never happen. So you really can be completely raw and honest. That’s what makes it such a special kind of intimacy.”
In other words, I ask, many women are just so sick of having to deal with that from men all the time? “Exactly,” she replies.