AMAZING WILL
Back to reprise his famous sitcom role, Eric McCormack is feeling the love,
“We are contractually prohibited from aging.”
That was the riposte from Eric McCormack to me the other night in Toronto, as the familiar swoosh of a pre-party-to-a-dinner went about us. The actor, who doesn’t look a day over 43 — his age when he signed off Will & Grace11whole years ago — was playing to my observation that the show, rearing for a much-ado reboot this month, has the luck of having four leading stars who seem to look exactly as they did when they wrapped the show, seemingly forever, in 2006. Will, Grace, Jack and Karen. Uncanny.
Is Steve Jobs still alive? Is Elizabeth Taylor? Is Kris Jenner still just another nice mom in Calabasas, and LiLo on the alternate-reality path of having J-Law’s career? Has the zeitgeist not yet been roped into the idea of the “selfie” or, heck, become acquainted with the term “LOL”?
So very much has happened since Will & Grace swan-sung into the sunset during the era of Must-SeeTV, yet on a scale of 1 to Lowe (Rob, that is), McCormack still reads closer to the latter, as he proved decisively on Monday at the Four Seasons Hotel.
“Strange . . . but not strange,” Mr. Tall/Dark/Handsome summed up, when asked about reprising his most famous role on NBC. Will is his “id,” and the show — revelling in the idea of being much-needed comfort-food in these turbulent times — will be back on Thursday nights as a near facsimile of the old show with its I Love Lucy- esque four-part patter. (The writers of the show decided to pretend that the 2006 finale — which showed Will and Grace, both separately married with kids — never happened!)
He and Debra Messing’s alter-ego Grace are still living together — in their 50s? Yup. McCormack fills in the gaps: “It’s actually something kind of wonderful . . . it’s people in mid-life saying, ‘Hey, wait, I’ve tried, but I still haven’t found anything better than this.’ ”
What is different, though — as the Toronto-sprung McCormack conceded — are the changing winds of the social climate since he played the first out gay lead on a situation comedy. It was former U.S. vicepresident Joe Biden, after all, who when announcing his support for marriage equality on Meet the Press, in 2012, said, “I think Will & Grace did more to educate the American public (on LGBT issues) than almost anything anybody has ever done so far.”
McCormack still sorta can’t believe it. More persuasive, perhaps: the love in the room for the Canadian when the scene moved to a peoniesfilled sit-down, as part of the annual Stratford Festival Gala. As this year’s Legacy Award honoree — McCormack performed in 17 productions at the festival from 1985 to 1989 — he was in for a “This Is Your Life” kind of night, held over Alaskan black cod or Ontario beef tenderloin, complete with a performance by Beautiful’s Chilina Kennedy and a medley from the Tony Award-winning Brent Carver, who got the room aflutter when he sank into a version of “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story.
Co-chaired this year by the trio of Barry Avrich, Robert Badum and Wendy Pitblado, and hosted by the festival Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino, the society-speckled night peaked again when celebrated playwright Michael Healey took the podium. Roommates with McCormack in Toronto, back in their ramen days, he wryly recalled that burst of youth.
“In 1982, he was just impossibly beautiful. Walking down the street with Eric was like being in a cartoon — cars would run into light poles, you could hear jaws audibly dislocate . . . Shopkeepers and waiters and waitresses would throw themselves at him.”
“You would come into a coffee shop,” he went on, “and there would be two free cups of coffee — free ones — and a biscotti in front of Eric, on the table before him, his perfect bum in his chair. Nothing for you, of course. It was an exercise in profound humility going anywhere with Eric.”
The second thing you should know, Healey followed up, is that about 15 minutes into their first day at Ryerson Theatre School, it was obvious to everyone that McCormack was “the most talented person in our class.” This, he said, was “bracing for many of us.”
Taking the stage shortly after — his ego well-watered — the man of the hour proceeded to hit all the right notes. Calling the Stratford Festival the place where “he learned to fly,” where he was only too excited to “carry a spear” in an early production, McCormack made a few bawdy jokes (very Will!), and then spoke directly about his wife, Janet.
Having just celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary, he turned to her in the room and quipped, “I said to her, I want do something special for you. I want to take you to an evening, where all people talk about . . . is me.”