Online, on the trail
Messing plays detective ‘Searching’ for missing girl
Debra Messing is used to getting laughs with “Will & Grace” and mining drama in her “Mysteries of Laura” series, but next week’s “Searching” is truly something else. As Detective Rosemary Vick in “Searching,” Messing, 50, leads the hunt to find missing 16-yearold Margot (Michelle La), as John Cho’s widower father searches for his daughter online and slowly comprehends his daughter’s hidden life.
It’s a discovery Vick follows as well.
In fact, “Searching” is a story told entirely via computer screens and social media.
That was, Messing said, “the most challenging thing I’ve ever been a part of. As actors, one of the things you’re hungry for is the intangible magic that happens in a scene looking into someone’s eyes.
“For the entire film that was taken from me. Not for one frame of film do I get to look in John Cho’s eyes. It did make me feel unsettled, unsafe, a little scared.
“But sitting down with (cowriter and director) Aneesh (Chaganty), it was clear he was sure footed.
“It was looking at a blank screen and having to imagine these scenes that are sometimes emotional or urgent.
“I wasn’t prepared for how technically rigid it had to be,” she added. “I had Aneesh saying into my earwig, ‘Debra, move your eye another half inch. That is John’s face and you cannot move your eyes from there.’
“Obviously that challenges the imagination to the nth grade.”
The role had a personal link as well. “Because I had played a detective for ‘The Mysteries of Laura’ and done research for that with ‘drive-alongs’ and talked to detectives about stress and lack of time with their family, I had a really good base.
“Then I researched missing persons in California and learned how many kids go missing, how many cases are never solved.
“And I just kept coming back to being a mother. I’m a single mom of a son” — Roman, 17 — “and my character is a single mom of a son. Every parent’s worst nightmare is a child going missing, a child in trouble.
“That’s why the film is really accessible. Any parent will understand the stakes.”