MARCIA GAY HARDEN B.J. NOVAK’S REVENGE
The Oscar-winning actress for Pollock and the star of TV’s Code Black, 62, co-stars in the bittersweet romantic comedy series Uncoupled
(July 29 on Netflix). Harden plays Claire, a New York socialite navigating a recent breakup alongside her gay real estate broker, Michael (Neil Patrick Harris), who’s in a similar romantic situation.
How would you describe Claire and Michael? We’re both uncoupling but in different ways. Neil’s character is coming up against all these new opportunities for freedom, but he isn’t quite ready to partake. Emotionally, Claire is going through the same thing; she’s not ready. I think Claire’s journey is to love herself on her own. It sounds a little Hallmark-y, but for a woman in her 60s, we are trained to think that our attractiveness has to do with our age, our ability to have children and our ability to be anthropologically viable in a tribe, let’s say.
Is it fair to compare Uncoupled to Sex and the City? [It is] sort of the gay Sex and the City. [Characters] wonderfully push sexual boundaries and sexual information in the show. It’s always done with a laugh and a little tongue-incheek, but there’s an emotional heartbeat as well.
Can you tell us about your other new series, So Help Me Todd, coming out this fall on CBS? It’s a mother-son story of oil and vinegar and how they come to work together. She’s a highfalutin lawyer; he’s a down-and-out private detective. Through circumstances, they work together and, hopefully, begin to recognize and respect each other. But there are a lot of kerfuffles in the process.
Are you back for season three of The Morning Show? I don’t know. She was such a fantastic character, [hard-hitting reporter] Maggie Brener; I would love for her to be back. People really respond to her. She’s loosely based on the fabulous [New York Times reporter] Maureen Dowd.
What are your plans for the summer? I’m starting a film, a short little comedy in New Jersey. Then I get to pop up to the Catskills, pick some blueberries and make some jam. That’s what I love. My nephew’s getting married on my property, and then I’m off to Vancouver to start So Help Me Todd. Busy!
Novak directs and stars in Vengeance (in theaters July 27) as an aspiring podcaster in search of a story when a woman he’d been seeing in New York turns up dead in a West Texas oil field. Sensing a truecrime tale that could make his career, he’s drawn into a fullscale mystery—and a plot for revenge. “That premise has been in movies since the beginning; it’s a very male-gaze, classic movie trope,” says Novak, 42, who starred in TV’s The Office and the movies Inglourious Basterds, Saving Mr. Banks and The Founder. “But it’s also extremely social-media age, this sense of loss and the digital ghost of someone.”